it I I't'S •' ^' M : ' 

PI i'i:'^ '■:- 

^H '•*};'!•. :;'r^M I.:.--, 






t;. 












r:'! 






^. ,1 






I iMr^l-^ .!■!'-'' 's^^;-, 




' > 1 1 n ^ 



MODERN POETS 

AND ^ / 

CHRISTIAN TEACHING 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

« 

BY ^ 

JAMES MAIN DIXON 



itif 




^ 


t; 


» > > 

> 5 


X 


NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 




/ 


..^^ 



iir 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

NOV 21 i906 

CopyrlffM Entry 

cure O- XXc, No. 

COPY 0. 



Copyright, 1906, by 
EATON & MAINS, 



\ 



{■ 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. Modern German Thought in Arnold's Teaching - 7 

II. Arnold and French Thotight - - - - - 31 

III. Arnold and Wordsworth as Religious Teachers - 48 

IV. The Mirror and the Cup 71 

V. Arnold's Sympathy with the Brute Creation - 97 

VI, Matthew Arnold and Modern Science - - - 113 

VII. A Nineteenth Century Sadducee - - - 123 

VIII. The Fatherhood of God in Arnold- - - - 148 

Index - - -- - - - - - 163 



/ 



\ 



PREFATORY NOTE 

These studies, thrown into the form of eight 
lectures, deal with those phases and currents in the 
hfe and philosophy of Matthew Arnold which 
determined his religious creed and gave the final 
drift to his poetry. 

Good poetry ought to be taken seriously and 
analytically. I remember the shock I received as 
a youth in reading in an intensely orthodox journal 
a favorable review of a book of poems which I 
knew contained avowedly agnostic opinions. Had 
these opinions been couched in prose, extreme 
denunciation would have fallen upon them. Now, 
true poetry is one of the subtlest mediums for 
influencing thought and belief, and its aesthetic 
appeal is only secondary. The theology in Arnold's 
prose and poetry is essentially the same, otherwise 
he would be no true poet; and the theology in 
both is extraordinarily warped and defective. My 
task has thus been somewhat of an ungracious one. 
To have treated Arnold from the side of whole- 
hearted eulogy would have meant an incursion 
into fairyland, as in the "Forsaken Merman,'' 
or into legendary history, as in "Sohrab and 
Rustum" or "Tristram and Iseult." 

The Author. 

5 



CHAPTER I 

MODERN GERMAN THOUGHT IN ARNOLD'S ' 

TEACHING 

If Matthew Arnold may be termed the poet- 
critic of England, then Goethe, the poet-critic of 
Germany, is to be regarded as his forerunner and 
instructor. Few thinkers in the whole record of 
literature have exercised upon men of light and 
leading so remarkable an influence as the German 
Goethe. In his lucid pages we find expounded 
the principles which are guiding our modern world, 
as distinguished from the world of mediaevalism 
and authority which preceded it. Those who read 
at all deeply into poetry must feel how great is the 
gap that divides, say, Milton from Tennyson, or 
Pope from Arnold. It was the mission of Germany 
to place upon the most systematic basis the laws 
which regulate our modern theories of good and 
bad, of the admirable and the trivial. Of all 
thinkers, Goethe, with his large mind, best under- 
stood the full significance of the change; took in 
the final meaning of the drift toward evolution as 
an explanation of things, and weighed all human 
matters in a critical balance. 

Arnold's very apposite and weighty verses on 

7 



8 Matthew Arnold 

Goethe I will deal with later. That he early came 
under the spell of the sage of Weimar is apparent 
to all acquainted with his life story. We find 
him constantly making such references as this in 
his Letters: "I read his [Goethe's] letters. Bacon, 
Pindar, Sophocles, Milton, Thomas a Kempis, and 
Ecclesiasticus;" and in his "Note-Book" Goethe's 
name once and again recurs. For instance, in 
the year 1878, he quotes Kestner on Goethe 
at twenty-four: "Vor der Christlichen Religion 
hat er Hochachtung, nicht aber in der Gestalt wie 
sie unsere Theologen vorstellen" ("While highly 
esteeming the Christian religion, it was not in the 
way our theologians conceive it"). Goethe has 
been called a modern pagan, and his conception 
of Christianity was certainly very far from the 
orthodox or evangelical conception. It does not 
seem that Arnold ever broke away from his spell 
as Tennyson did. 

Practically, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" owes 
its existence to the break he had to make 
with Goethe's ideals of self-culture and perfection; 
but Arnold never came to the forking of the roads. 
It is no use attempting to place that great Chris- 
tian apologetic, "In Memoriam," side by side with 
Arnold's poems, as if the final teaching were the 
same. Arnold remains in the lucidity or self- 
culture fold from which Tennyson departed per- 



Modern German Thought 9 

force, never to return. Arnold always regarded 
the poet-laureate as not much of a philosopher, 
but rather as a builder of words into sonorous 
phrases; the judgment, not of a jealous contem- 
porary, but of an honest friend who saw things 
differently. Others, and I think rightly, rate 
Tennyson very high as a profound thinker. 

Turn lo the first section of "In Memoriam,'' 
immediately following the great invocation : 

I held it truth, with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 

Of their dead selves to higher things. 

This word "clear" denotes the lucidity so dear 
to lovers of classical literature, the characteristic 
of the best spirits of the pagan world. So Milton 
uses it: 

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise — 

That last infirmity of noble mind — 

To scorn delights, and live laborious days. 

Tennyson had this ideal before him when Ar- 
thur Hallam died; and the bitter experience made 
him root his faith deeper. But no crisis came 
in Arnold's life such as might test his spirit to its 
depths; he always remained essentially a fair- 
weather vessel, never venturing into the deeps 
where storms are raging, nor did any chance 
tempest strike him. To the end he appears 
lacking in finally rigorous logic and thoroughness 



10 Matthew Arnold 

of thought, and in moral grasp and conviction of 
an overmastering kind. 

Goethe purposely kept av^ay from stormy 
waters. If we take his "Rule of Life," composed 
in 1 8 15 and afterward expanded, as expounding 
his principles, we have exactly such a philosophy 
as might please and charm a thoughtful man 
except when he was fathoming the depths of 
despair: 

If thou wouldst live unruffled by care, 
Let not the past torment thee e'er; 
If any loss thou hast to rue, 
Act as though thou wert born anew; 
Inquire the meaning of each day, 
What each day means itself will say : 
In thine own actions take thy pleasure, 
What others do thou'lt duly treasure. 
Ne'er let thy breast with hate be supplied. 
And to God the future confide. 

This "clearness" is the goal sought after by 
Matthew Arnold. In the poem which contains 
an exposition of his philosophy, "A Summer 
Night," there is a closing invocation to clearness: 

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain, 

Clearness divine! 

Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 

Of languor, though so calm, and though so great 

Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ; 

Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, 

And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil! 

I will not say that your mild deeps retain 

A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain 



Modern Gerivian Thought ii 

Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain — 

But I will rather say that you remain 

A world above man's head, to let him see 

How boiuidless might his soul's horizons be, 

How vast, yet of what clear transparency! 

How prophetic was Milton in declaring that 
he "clear spirit" had infirmities of its own! a 
.^ve of distinction, a proud acceptance, if need be, 
of isolation. Dr. Thomas Arnold confessed that 
he had a weakness to be either Caesar or nobody; 
proudly to assert himself or as proudly efface 
himself. This temper descended to his gifted son. 
A recent commentator, Professor Saintsbury, in 
estimating highly the poetic quality of this poem 
from which I have just quoted, questions whether 
the vague life-philosophy of Arnold expounded 
here and elsewhere — which, out of a melancholy 
agnosticism, with a quantum of asceticism, erected 
a creed — was "anything more than a not- 
ungraceful will-worship of pride." It is the 
haughty stoicism that the world has rejected. 
Very disappointing is it to find Arnold bidding 
farewell to a beloved son, who died in the first 
flush of manhood, not in the words of hope given 
to us by revelation, but in the phraseology of a 
heathen poet. "How fond you were of him," he 
wrote to the lad's grandmother, "and how I like 
to recall this ! He looks beautiful, and my main 
feeling about him is, I am glad to say, what I 



12 Matthew Arnold 

have put in one of my poems, the 'Fragment 
of Dejaneira': 

"But him on whom, in the prime 
Of life, with vigor undimmed, 
With unspent mind, and a soul 
Unworn, undebased, undecayed, 
Mournfully grating, the gates 
Of the city of death have forever closed — 
Him, I count him, well-starred." 

There is no hope born of the new life of the 
soul that continues after death. With Goethe 
and with Arnold the injunction, "Ye must be 
born again," meant simply the attainment of 
increased perfection in this present life. " Which 
religion," asks Arnold in his "Progress," 

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can ? 

Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain? 
Which has not cried to sunk, self -weary man: 
Thou must be born again! 

Surely none except the religion of Jesus, who 
hath abolished death and brought life and 
immortality to light through the gospel. Arnold, 
the lover of lucidity, has estimated the German 
poet in lines of singular appositeness: 

When Goethe's death was told, we said: 
Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. 
Physician of the iron age, 
Goethe has done his pilgrimage. 
He took the suffering human race, 

He read each wound, each weakness clear, 
And struck his finger on the place, 

And said : Thou ailest here, and here! 



Modern German Thought 13 

He looked on Europe's dying hour 

Of fitful dream and feverish power ; 

His eye plunged down the weltering strife — 

The turmoil of expiring life — 

He said: The end is everywhere. 

Art still has truth, take refuge there! 

And he was happy, if to know 

Causes of things, and far below 

His feet to see the Itirid flow 

Of terror, and insane distress, 

And headlong fate, be happiness! 

In these lines Arnold ascribes to Goethe the 
preeminent quality of lucidity: Felix qui potuit 
rerum cognoscere causas. Skillful diagnosis, phil- 
osophical insight into the workings of the world — 
these qualities characterized him. But there he 
stops. If this can constitute happiness, then, says 
Arnold, Goethe had happiness; suggesting, how- 
ever, at the same time, that this insight does 
not bring happiness. In the agonized prayer 
of his own Stagirius: 

When the soul, growing clearer, 
Sees God no nearer; 
When the soul, mounting higher, 
To God comes no nigher; 
But the arch-fiend Pride 
Mounts at her side, 
Foiling her high emprise, 
Sealing her eagle eyes, . . , 
Save, O! save. 

From the serene height of his own elevation, 
borne along in the current of an age that was fuU 



14 Matthew Arnold 

of life and enthusiasm, the sage of Weimar never 
lost his buoyancy of temperament. His pupils, 
however, with less vitality and poorer nerves, 
found that his rule of life led to no such equable 
contemplation of life. Goethe's optimism was tem- 
peramental and accidental, rather than inherent 
in his philosophy of life. 

In two respects may Goethe's teaching be 
pronounced unsatisfactory. His ideal of woman 
is not lofty enough; and the defect may in a 
measure be ascribed to a certain deliberate 
resolve on his own part never to risk shipwreck 
of fortune for a mere amatory passion. In 
Goethe's love affairs we fail to discover that 
ideal condition of things described by Tennyson, 
in which 

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords 

with might; 
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music 

out of sight. 

The realization of perfection, so far as it can 
be obtained here, was his ideal — a pagan rather 
than a Christian conception. This threw him 
back on self, where a more ideal spirit would have 
risked the earthly shipwreck of self. For in- 
stance, in his love affair with Frederika there is 
undoubtedly an element of unsatisfactoriness in 
the cool way in which he left her just when the 



Modern German Thought 15 

claims of his own personality seemed to demand 
the severance of their relations. "He sighed as a 
lover, he obeyed as a man of the vv^orld" — to parody 
a saying of Gibbon's. This element of intellec- 
tual coldness, visible here and elsewhere in the 
story of Goethe's life, kept him indifferent on the 
subject of immortality. He believed that a few 
of the stronger and more select spirits might win 
immortality; but the question did not trouble him 
deeply. Now, immortality is a matter that cannot 
be solved entirely in terms of the reason; it is 
largely a question of the affections, in the highest 
sense of the term. With Plato, the eternal was 
symbolized by the heavenly Aphrodite, frequently 
referred to by Tennyson in "In Memoriam" as 
the "high Muse," or Urania. Goethe had wor- 
shiped the earthly Aphrodite in but a half- 
hearted fashion, and how could it be expected that 
her heavenly sister would reveal herself to him ? 
"He that loveth not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not 
seen?" Goethe's teaching was found lacking 
by Tennyson when he stood by the recent grave 
of his dearly loved friend. On one occasion Ten- 
nyson and his friend Edward Fitzgerald were 
gazing at the busts of Dante and Goethe in a shop 
window in Regent Street, London. "What,'* 
asked Fitzgerald, "is there wanting in Goethe 



1 6 Matthew Arnold 

which the other has?" "The Divine/' replied 
the poet-laureate. 

In this rarefied atmosphere Arnold's notes 
are thin and unsatisfying. He devotes a lyric 
to Urania, but she figures as a disdainful goddess. 
Plato speaks of Urania in his Symposium, where 
she represents heavenly love as distinguished from 
mere earthly love. Milton confides himself to 
the guidance of Urania in one of his most impas- 
sioned passages: 

Up led by thee 

Into the heaven of heavens I have presumea, 
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air, 
Thy tempering; with like safety gmded down, 
Return me to my native element .... 
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole. 
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged 
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, 
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
And solitude ; yet not alone, while thou 
Visit' st my slumbers nightly, or when mom 
Purples the east; still govern thou my song, 
Urania, and fit audience find, though few. 

With that timid reverence with which he ap- 
proached sacred things, Tennyson introduces 
Urania as reproving his boldness in entering upon 
the domain of religion : 

Urania speaks with darkened brow: 

"Thou pratest here where thou art least" 
This faith has many a purer priest. 

And many an abler voice than thou. 



Modern German Thought 17 

But later on in "In Memoriam" the heavenly 
visitor speaks more encouragingly, as if touched 
with love and sympathy for his sorrow: 

The high Muse answered: "Wherefore grieve 

Thy brethren with a fruitless tear? 

Abide a Httle longer here, 
And thou shalt take a nobler leave." 

But Arnold's Urania, or Heavenly Wisdom, is 
not an approachable personage, who stoops to 
soothe and bless ordinary mortals. She reserves 
all her smiles for some selecter being, better 
worthy of her favors: 

Eagerly once her gracious ken 

Was turned upon the sons of men; 

But light the serious visage grew — 

She looked, and smiled, and saw them through. 

If she had only "seen them through" in the 
modern slang sense, as a helper and a kind friend, 
no one would have complained; but hers was a 
mere critical inspection that revealed their flaws: 

Our petty souls, our strutting wits, 
Our labored, puny passion-fits — 
Ah, may she scorn them still, till we 
Scorn them as bitterly as she ! 

Yet show her once, ye heavenly Powers, 
One of some worthier race than ours! 
One for whose sake she once might prove 
How deeply she who scorns can love. 

• ••••• 

And she to him will reach her hand, 
And gazing in his eyes will stand. 
And know her friend, and weep for glee, 
And cry: "Long, long I've looked for thee." 



1 8 Matthew Arnold 

Then will she weep: with smiles, till then, 
Coldly she mocks the sons of men; 
Till then, her lovely eyes maintain 
Their pure, unwavering, deep disdain. 

This word "disdain," not a pleasant word, 
occurs in another of Arnold's lyrics — one of his 
finest — the "Obermann Once More." He is paint- 
ing the meeting of triumphant, stern Rome with 
the grave Orient: 

The brooding East with awe beheld 

Her impious younger world. 
The Roman tempest swelled and swelled, 

And on her head was hurled. 

The East bowed low before the blast 

In patient, deep disdain; 
She let the legions thunder past, 

And plunged in thought again. 

So well she mused, a morning broke 

A.cross her spirit gray, 
A conquering, newborn joy awoke, 

And filled her life with day. 

"Poor world," she cried, "so deep accurst! 

That runn'st from pole to pole 
To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 

Go, seek it in thy soul!" 

She heard it, the victorious West, 

In crown and sword arrayed! 
She felt the void which mined her breast. 

She shivered and obeyed. 

This is bad psychology and bad history. So far 
from "disdaining" the might of armies, the 



Modern German Thought 19 

Oriental has ever been prone to worship and 
glorify Power. "Disdain" of a dreamer, on the 
one hand, "shivering" disillusion on the other, 
do not interpret the situation. The first, the Dis- 
dain, must be changed into warm, expansive Love, 
fruitful in all helpful, patient deeds, which is more 
powerful than armies; the second, the shivering 
disillusion, into the heartful recognition of this 
fuller humanity, the hearty acceptance of the 
new life offered to man by the divine Friend. 

The master and teacher of both Goethe and 
Arnold in their final attitude to the physical world 
was the Jewish philosopher, Benedict Spinoza. 
The two things," remarks Arnold in his 
Spinoza and the Bible," "which are most 
remarkable about him [Spinoza], and by which, as 
I think, he chiefly impressed Goethe, seem to me 
not to come from his Hebrew nature at all — I 
mean his denial of final causes and his stoicism, 
not passive, but active. For a mind like Goethe's 
— a mind profoundly impartial and passionately 
aspiring after the science, not of men only, but of 
universal nature — the popular philosophy which 
explains all things by reference to man and 
regards universal nature as existing for the sake 
of man, and even of certain classes of men, was 
utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy 
would gladly maintain that the donkey exists in 



(t 



20 Matthew Arnold 

order that the invalid Christian may have donkey's 
milk before breakfast; and such views of nature 
as this were exactly what Goethe's whole soul ! 
abhorred. Creation, he thought, should be made ,! 
of sterner stuff; he desired to rest the donkey's ? 
existence on larger grounds." 

Arnold then goes on to quote some distinctive 
passages from Spinoza's writings which outline 
his standpoint: **God directs nature according 
to the universal laws of nature, but not according 
as the particular laws of human nature require; 
and so God has regard, not of the human race 
only, but of entire nature." Does not this level a 
direct blow at the Puritan conception of God's 
dealings with Adam, Noah, and his chosen 
people .? Then follows a statement revealing 
Spinoza's stoicism: "Our desire is not that 
nature may obey us, but, on the contrary, that 
we may obey nature." 

"Here," remarks Arnold, "is the second source 
of Spinoza's attractiveness for Goethe, and a 
whole order of minds like him; he first impresses 
him, and then composes him. Filling and satisfy- 
ing his imagination by the width and grandeur of 
his own view of nature, the Jewish thinker then 
fortifies and stills his mobile, straining, passionate 
temperament by the moral lesson he draws from 
his view of nature." 



Modern German Thought 21 

In his "Saint Paul and Protestantism" Arnold 
loses his complete sympathy with the man of 
Tarsus when the latter "Hebraizes" and 
"Judaizes"; which Spinoza is careful not to do 
— he keeps within the field common to philosophy, 
literature, and natural religion. A combination of 
Paul and Spinoza would have pleased Arnold 
entirely. * Spinoza conceives of religious things in 
terms that are too intellectual, " crowning the intel- 
lectual life with a sacred transport." Goethe so 
conceived of them and so did Arnold, making 
abstractions out of life. The close of Arnold's 
"Spinoza and the Bible" is well worth quoting as 
summing up his final attitude toward this 
modern Plato, as he calls him: "One may say 
to the wise and devout Christian, 'Spinoza's con- 
ception of beatitude is not yours and cannot 
satisfy you, but whose conception of beatitude 
would you accept as satisfying ? Not even that 
of the devoutest of your fellow Christians. Fra 
Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired of 
devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of 
the Last Judgment, his conception of beatitude. 
The elect are going round in a ring on long 
grass under laden fruit-trees; two of them, more 
restless than the others, are flying up a battle- 
mented street — a street blank with all the 
ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible. 



22 Matthew Arnold 

for the delectation of the saints, a blazing cal- 
dron in which Beelzebub is sousing the damned. 
This is hardly more your conception of beatitude 

than Spinoza's is. But *^in my Father's house are ! 
many mansions"; only, to reach any one of these 
mansions, there are needed the wings of a genuine 
sacred transport, of an "immortal longing."' 

These wings Spinoza had; and because he had I 

them his own language about himself, about his j 

aspirations and his course, is true: his foot is in - 

the vera vita, his eye on the beatific vision. " \ 

In these closing passages in "Spinoza and the ! 

Bible" Arnold speaks as if he himself were dis- 1 

tinctly in the Christian fold; where he always was | 

by inclination and training, but from which he \ 

often seems to draw aside by a kind of intel- , 

lectual overscrupulousness. He strove to realize j 

two visions that are quite incompatible. * 

Another German thinker, a predecessor of I 

Goethe's, enters directly into Arnold's poetry — j 

the Saxon Lessinp;. To him Arnold devotes a ; 

poem which is but little noticed or quoted, his | 
"Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon." And yet in 

some respects the poem is equally significant to i 

us with Browning's "Abt Vogler," in that it pro- { 

pounds and answers a question in the sphere of the ] 

higher aesthetics, where the domain of aesthetics i 

touches that of religion. Browning gives music j 



Modern German Thought 23 

a final preeminence over the other arts because 
it is not subject to analysis: 

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the Will that 

can, 
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo! 

they are. 

Arnold discusses in his verses the question why 
poetry so often fails of its mission when music 
and art triumphantly succeed. He never allows 
it to be doubted that poetry is the highest of all 
arts; he merely wonders why first-rate poetry is 
so rare, and tries to furnish a satisfactory answer. 

Arnold is not a devotee of music, as was Brown- 
ing, and is never warmed by its inspiration like 
his contemporary. Music, after all, has but a 
slight hold upon conduct, and is singularly unsatis- 
fying on the moral side. For Browning's artistic 
ends its symbolic use in " Abt Vogler" is justified, 
and is appropriate; but, finally speaking, music 
must rank below poetry; and Arnold is right in so 
classing it. 

To Arnold, Lessing was no mean prophet. In 
the story of Germany he comes next after Luther 
as an apostle of truth. While Luther was the 
master spirit of the great religious upheaval of the 
sixteenth century, Lessing was the chief light in 
the intellectual revival of the eighteenth, known 
as the period of Illuminism. Arnold was not 



24 Matthew Arnold 

exceedingly fond of Luther, whose frequent lack ^"^ 

of "dignity and distinction" displeased the fas- | 

tidious Englishman. Even as a final exponent of I 

God's eternal truths he has declared that Luther | 

was equaled or surpassed by the old Greeks; and j 

his Gemeinheity or commonness, prepared the I 

way for no outburst of literature to elevate human- | 

ity. The two hundred years of German life after j 

Luther's death, save for a few inspired hymns, ] 

are almost barren of any literary production of j 

value. ! 

But Lessing's mission was fruitful in results. J 

When poetry was regarded as something merely \ 

didactic or fanciful, he asserted for it a high and ; 

dignified role as a final interpreter of life. Before j 

Lessing's time the critical world was in a misty j 

fog of verbiage and mere tradition, but with his i 

labors we get into *'the bright and populous ; 

thoroughfare of human life which binds the \ 

ages together." Yet Lessing left one question : 

unanswered which supplies material for Arnold's ; 

poem: ] 

"Ah, " cries my friend, ' 'but who hath taught : 

Why music and the other arts \ 

Oftener perform aright their parts ; 

Than poetry? why she, than they, i 

Fewer fine successes can display?" \ 

In reply Arnold admits that Pausanias found, ! 

when traveling in Greece — the highly gifted land — ! 



Modern German Thought 25 

that good poems were rarer than good statues. 
In mediaeval Italy, which produced Dante, Tasso, 
Petrarch, and Ariosto, painting seemed to lead 
the way with Raphael and his brotherhood: 

And nobly perfect, in our day 
Of haste, half -work, and disarray, 
Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, 
^ath risen Goethe's, Wordsworth's song; 
Yet even I (and none will bow 
Deeper to these) must needs allow, 
They yield us not, to soothe our pains, 
Such multitude of heavenly strains 
As from the kings of sound are blown — 
Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn. 

As his friend and he passed along through Hyde 
Park in London (where the conversation is repre- 
sented as having occurred) they looked upon the 
green grass, the bright elm trees, the restful kine: 

"Behold," I said, "the painter's sphere! 
The limits of his art appear. 
The passing group, the summer mom. 
The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn — 
Those cattle couched, or, as they rise, 
Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes — 
These, or much greater things, but caught 
Like these, and in one aspect brought! 
In outward semblance he must give 
A moment's life of things that live; 
Then let him choose his moment well, 
With power divine its story tell." 

Their walk brings them in sight of Westmin- 
ster Abbey, and the rustling breeze seems to 



26 Matthew Arnold 

whisper to their ears the charmed tones of sacred 
music : i 

"Miserere, Domine/" || 

The words are uttered, and they flee. 

Deep is their penitential moan, 

Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone. 

They have declared the spirit's sore, 

Sore load, and words can do no more, 

Beethoven takes them then — these two 

Poor, bounded words — and makes them new; 

Infinite makes them, makes them young; 

Transplants them to another tongue. 

Where they can now, without constraint, 

Pour all the soul of their complaint, 

And roll adown a channel large 

The wealth divine they have in charge. 

Page after page of music turn. 

And still they live, and still they burn. 

Eternal, passion-fraught, and free — 

' ' Miserere, Domine / " • 

So much for the mission of music. The scene i 

then changes to the busy throng of Rotten Row, ; 

and the two inquirers gaze upon humanity in j 

movement: ! 



The young, the happy, and the fair, 

The old, the sad, the worn, were there; '< 

Som.e vacant and some musing went. 

And some in talk and merriment. 

Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells! 

And now and then, perhaps, there swells 

A sigh, a tear — ^but in the throng 

All changes fast, and hies along. 

Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground? 

And to what goal, what ending, bound? 

"Behold at last the poet's sphere! 

But who," I said, " suffices here?" 



Modern German Thought 27 

The question as propounded by Arnold would 
seem to demand an answer in terms of religion; 
but he limits himself wholly to the domain of art, 
and replies as a pure humanist. The task he 
speaks of is not one for the moralist, but for 
the supreme artist — the gifted personage who 
can reveal to his audience not only the aspect 
of the moment, like a painter, and the feeling of 
the moment, like the musician, but also life's 
movement: 

The movement he must tell of life, 
Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; 
His eye must travel down, at ftill. 
The long, unpausing spectacle; 
With faithful, unrelaxing force 
Attend it from its primal source, 
From change to change and year to year 
Attend it of its mid-career, 
Attend it to the last repose 
And solemn silence of its close. 

According to Arnold, most poets who apply them- 
selves to this task of mirroring life — hov/ fond he 
is of that word "mirror"! — are ill endowed for 
the task, and some show feebleness and intellec- 
tual embarrassment. All they get out of life's 
majestic river is a momentary gleam, and they 
give us mere snatches of song. 

There are, however, two figures which tower 
above the rest of the crowd and speak with power 



28 Matthew Arnold 

and pathos far surpassing the message of any 
painter or musician: 

Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach 

The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach. 

To "^ lese, to these, their thankful race 

Gives, then, the first, the fairest place; 

And brightest is their glory's sheen, 

For greatest hath their labor been. 

Arnold here seems to speak the language of 
exaggeration, and to place Homer and Shakespeare 
upon an undeserved pinnacle. It must be 
remembered that Shakespeare was dumb on 
one deep and essential topic, that of religion. 
He is a pure humanist, and in certain essential 
respects limits the scope of his inquiries into the 
meaning and drift of life. He can hardly be said 
to have given us a hero; and to speak of his breath- 
ing "immortal air" — an expression Arnold makes 
use of in another passage — is to employ more than 
equivocal language: 

Deeply the poet feels; but he 
Breathes, when he will, immortal air, 
Where Orpheus and where Homer are. 

The poet, he declares in "Resignation," is 
"more than man": 

In the day's life, whose iron round 
Hems us all in, he is not bound ; 
He leaves his kind, o'erleaps their pen, 
And flees the coiTimon life of men. 



Modern German Thought 29 

And yet, notwithstanding his almost idolatrous 
sonnet to Shakespeare, Arnold reckoned him lower 
than his idolized Homer; the modern poet was as 
imperfection to perfection. Here is the sonnet: 

SHAKESPEARE 

Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, 
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, 

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, 

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, 

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place. 
Spares but the cloudy border of his base 

To the foiled searcher of mortality ; 

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know. 

Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored, self-secure. 
Didst tread on earth imguessed at, — Better so! 

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, 
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. 

This language implies a deification of humanity 
after the fashion of Auguste Comte. It is modern 
Illuminism in its antichristian aspect, demanding 
a new definition for the terms "immortal" and 
"immortality" such as is accorded them by mod- 
ern savants. When they bid an eternal farewell 
to dead friends, beside graves unblest by Chris- 
tian rites that bespeak the Christian hope of 
immortality, their panegyrics contain aspirations 
after this mundane form of immortality. It may 
be defined from this "Epilogue to Lessing's 



30 Matthew Arnold 

Laocoon" as the power to charm humanity for- 
ever: 

They speak ! the happiness divine 
They feel runs o'er in every Hne ; 
Its spell is round them like a shower — 
It gives them pathos, gives them power. 
No painter yet hath such a way, 
Nor no musician made, as they. 
And gathered on immortal knolls 
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls. 

If the words "immortal" and "divine" are 
keywords to the interpretation of the essence of 
Christ's message to man, then they are used here 
with a significance that is entirely neopagan and 
useless for theology. 



CHAPTER II 

ARNOLD AND FRENCH THOUGHT 

Matthew Arnold loved France and French- 
men. The fair mistress to whom are addressed 
his earl^fclove lays was Marguerite, a Swiss maiden 
who spoke the soft, smooth accents of the people 
dwelling by the Seine. His "A Memory-Picture'' 
is laid in Switzerland; so is his "Dream'': 

We shot beneath the cottage with the stream. 
On the brown, rude-carved balcony, two forms 
Came forth — Olivia's, Marguerite! and thine. 
Clad were they both in white, flowers in their breast; 
Straw hats bedecked their heads, with ribbons blue. 
Which danced, and on their shoulders, fluttering, 

played. 
They saw us, they conferred; their bosoms heaved, 
And more than mortal impulse filled their eyes. 
Their lips moved; their white arms, waved eagerly, 
Flashed once, like falling streams; we rose, we gazed; 
One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat 
Hung poised — and then the darting river of Life 
(Such now, methought, it was), the river of Life, 
Loud thundering, bore us by; swift, swift it foamed, 
Black imder cliffs it raced, round headlands shone. 
Soon the planked cottage 'mid the sim-warmed pines 
Faded — the moss — the rocks; us burning plains, 
Bristled with cities — us the sea received. 

Here is his old-world conception of the sea 
as something cruel and ingulfing which separates 

31 



32 Matthew Arnold 

mortals and keeps them apart. "Time's barren, j 
Stormy flow" he calls it in another of the Mar- - 
guerite poems, which contains two of his finest . 
quatrains: 

This is the curse of life ! that not 

A nobler, calmer train 
Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot 

Our passions from our brain. 

But each day brings its petty dust 

Our soon-choked souls to fill, 
And we forget because we must, 

And not because we will. 



But yet, interesting as are the Marguerite poems , 
to readers of Arnold, Switzerland and the way i 
thither through sunny France are less associated :i 
with them than with the Obermann poems. Ober- i 
mann was a philosopher with a certain outlook 'J 
on life which fascinated Arnold. There is an ii 
element of gay capriciousness in Arnold's whole ] 
life and method which makes us feel that he cer- II 
tainly saw life vividly, yet he failed to "see life,; 
steadily and see it whole. " When he visited the j 
Grande Chartreuse, 



Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused 
With rain, where thick the crocus blows , 

•0 

and felt its "gloom profound"; and, among Alpine ' 
peaks, (i 



Arnold and French Thought 33 

Watched the rosy light 
Fade from the distant peaks of snow; 
And on the air of night 

Heard accents of the eternal tongue 
Through the pine branches play — 

he was under the spell of this skeptical, melan- 
choly Obermann, who inhabited a mountain 
chalet -in these retired haunts. A casual reader 
of his pages would suppose that Senancour, the 
creator of "Obermann," was a representative 
Frenchman of the period, whose musings upon 
life and destiny satisfied the intellectual cravings 
of the time. But this is not the case, notwith- 
standing George Sand's rhetoric. Sainte-Beuve, 
the great French critic, for whom Arnold had 
an unbounded respect, discusses at length, in the 
numerous volumes of his Causeries de Lundi, 
literary personages and literary influences, yet he 
refers only twice to the author of **Obermann." 
In each case it is to contrast him, and not over- 
favorably, with some other nature-lover. In 
his detailed account of TopfFer, for instance, a 
highly accomplished writer who died in his prime, 
in 1846, when fame was just coming to him, Sainte- 
Beuve quotes his description of the valley of Cer- 
vin, remarking on the magnificent sweep and 
exactness of the passage. I translate the closing 
half: "Lower down productiveness, change, 



34 Matthew Arnold ' j 

renewal surround us; the active and fruitful soil i 
clothes itself eternally with raiment or with flowers, j 
and God seems to bring his hand near to us that J 
we may take from it the food of summer and the 
provisions of winter. But here, where that hand 
seems to be withdrawn, deep down in the heart we 
experience new impressions of abandonment 
and terror; we recognize in its nakedness, so to 
speak, the utter weakness of man, his speedy 
and final destruction, if, but for an instant, the 
divine goodness failed to surround him with tender 
cares and infinite succors. Mute but powerful 
poetry, which, from the very fact that it turns the 
thought toward the grand mysteries of creation, 
seizes the soul and uplifts it ! So, while the habitual 
spectacle of the divine bounty is apt to make us 
forget God, the chance spectacle of immense i 
sterilities, of gloomy deserts, of regions without I 
life, without succor, without bounties, draws us i 
Godward by a lively feeling of gratitude; so that ' 
more than one man who forgot God in the plains i 
has remembered him among the mountains." At | 
such times, says Sainte-Beuve, TopfFer's reflec- 
tions carry us back to the awful glory of ancient 
Sinai, the descriptions of the prophets, and all 
that appeals to man in biblical story; while "the 
same spectacle raises far other thoughts in the 
minds of men like Senancour, another famous 



^ Arnold and French Thought 35 

nature-lover; they see therein only the culmination 
and underlying witness of blind forces, and, even 
when most admiring, get nothing out of it but 
sadness, horror, and desolation." He also con- 
trasts Senancour's attitude elsewhere with that of 
a lover of nature's moods, like Ramond, who was 
at once geologist, botanist, and physicist. Where 
Senancour merely gets a new ecstatic thrill which 
leaves behind a sensation of blankness, Ramond 
finds something to call forth admiration and 
enthusiasm. Sainte-Beuve seems to have pre- 
ferred Arnold's interpretation of Obermann to the 
original, for he translated the English poet's verses 
into excellent French equivalents. 

In his first set of "Stanzas in Memory of the 
Author of Obermann" Arnold compares the 
Frenchman's teaching with that of Wordsworth 
and of Goethe: 

Yet, of the spirits who have reigned 

In this our troubled day, 
I know but two who have attained, 

Save thee, to see their way. 

• •«••• 

But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken 

From half of human fate; 
And Goethe's course few sons of men 

May think to emulate. 

• • . • • • 

Too fast we live, too much are tried. 

Too harassed, to attain 
Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 

And luminous view to gain. 



36 Matthew Arnold 

And then we tiim, thou sadder sage, 

To thee! we feel thy spell! 
— The hopeless tangle of our age, 

Thou too hast scanned it well. 

Immovable thou sittest, still 

As death, composed to bear! 
Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill. 

And icy thy despair. 

Yes, as the son of Thetis said, 

I hear thee saying now : 
Greater by far than thou are dead; 

Strive not! die also thou! 

Away, the dreams that but deceive! 

And thou, sad guide, adieu! 
I go, fate drives me; but I leave 

Half of my life with you. 

We, in some unknown Power's employ, 

Move in a rigorous line ; 
Can neither, when we will, enjoy. 

Nor, when we will, resign. ) 

This is surely the philosophy of despair and \ 

disillusion, from which all warmth and vital \ 

humanity has departed. Is this "seeing one's j 

way" ? Better the attitude of Newman, with its ■ 

prayerfulness : I 

Keep thou my feet! I do not ask to see | 

The distant scene; one step enough for me. | 

j 

There is no prayer in Obermann's attitude; and ' 
Arnold's own conception of prayer is thin and ; 
faulty: an energy of aspiration toward the Eter- j 
nal Not-ourselves that makes for righteousness. I 



Arnold and French Thought 37 

"Nothing/' he remarks, "can be more efficacious, 
more right and more real than this." He quotes 
with approval Margaret Fuller's words: "Culti- 
vate the spirit of prayer. I do not mean agitation 
and excitement, but a deep desire for truth, purity, 
and goodness." 

Senancour, the author of "Obermann," lived in 
a time of depression and disillusion among think- 
ing men in France, when Napoleon Bonaparte 
was riding roughshod over the prostrate forms 
of French ideologues and idealists. Enthusiasts 
who had for a time warmed to a religion of human- 
ity felt their temperature grow cold and chill. 

Etienne Pivert de Senancour was really a belated 
French philosophe. Born in the reign of Louis 
XV, he found himself a ruined man at the Revolu- 
tion; and for some years he lived quietly in Switz- 
erland, where he married. His Obermann letters, 
which show the sentimental influence of Rousseau, 
were published in the year 1804, and attracted 
considerable notice and admiration. Obermann 
has the philosophic melancholy of a Hamlet, a 
Werther, or a Childe Harold, and has been com- 
pared with Goethe's and Byron's heroes b} 
George Sand, who held the book in high esteem. 
She compares Obermann to a wild bird on the 
cliffs, deprived of the use of his wings, who gazes 
upon shores whence sail happy vessels, and on 



^S Matthew Arnold 

which only wrecks are cast. It is the old, unhappy 
view of the ocean which the true modern rejects, 
but to which Arnold, with his belated classical 
leanings, still clings. Every lover of Arnold 
remembers the lines to Marguerite, beginning, 

Yes, in the sea of life enisled, 

With echoing straits between ns thrown, 

Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
V/e mortals live alone, 

and ending, 

A God, a God their severance ruled! 
And bade betwixt their souls to be 
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea. 

To the ancient world the sea meant warfare, 
trouble, disaster; only God could master it: **Or 
who," says the Eternal to Job, "who shut up the 
sea with doors, when it brake forth; and said. 
Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and 
here shall thy proud waves be stayed ?" In the 
same book it is spoken of as a raging monster 
or dragon; the sacred poet herein following the 
nature myth in which the stormy sea, assaulting 
the heavens with its billows, was an embodiment 
of lawlessness and evil, a rebel leading his hosts 
against the Almighty. Thus the opening verses of 
the forty-sixth psalm do not refer to an actual 
sea: "Though the waters thereof roar and be 
troubled, though the mountains shake with the 



Arnold and French Thought 39 

swelling thereof." It is the stormy maelstrom of 
the nation which the psalmist depicts. We have the 
same trope in the seventeenth chapter of the book 
of Revelation : "The waters which thou sawest, 
where the harlot sitteth, are peoples, and multi- 
tudes, and nations, and tongues." And when the 
seer declared that "there shall be no more sea" 
he foretold an endless period of calm and bliss. 

When they refer to the sea Byron speaks like 
an ancient and Keats like a modern. In an 
impassioned passage in "Fifine at the Fair" 
Browning throws contempt upon Byron for his 
attitude toward the ocean in the celebrated 
apostrophe in "Childe Harold"; 

[Thou] send'st him, shivering in the playful spray 
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies 
His petty hope in some near port or bay, 
And dashest him to earth again: — there let him lay. 

Browning rightly characterizes this as an un- 
worthy conception, expressed in blundering Eng- 
lish. But Keats rises to the occasion, as a 
true modern who loves the ocean, in one of his 
finest sonnets: 

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art. 

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, 
And w^atching with eternal lids apart. 

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, 
The moving waters at their priestlike task 

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. 



40 Matthew Arnold 

Oddly enough, in one of his Essays — that on 
Maurice de Guerin — Arnold, quoting from this 
sonnet of Keats, makes a serious and significant 
blunder. He has been comparing religion with 
science, to the detriment of the latter. "The 
interpretations of science," he declares, *'do not 
give us this intimate sense of objects as the 
interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a 
limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is 
not Linnaeus, or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives 
us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, 
who seizes their secret for us, who makes us par- 
ticipate in their life; it is Shakespeare, with his 

daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; 

it is Wordsworth, with his 

voice . . . heard 
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird, 
Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides ; 

it is Keats, with his 

moving waters at their priestlike task 
Of cold [sic!] ablution round earth's human shores; 

it is Chateaubriand, with his cime indeterminde 
des jorSts; it is Senancour, with his mountain birch- 
tree: Cette dcorce hlanche, lisse et crevassie; cette 



Arnold and French Thought 41 

tige agreste; ces branches qui s^inclinent vers la 
terre; la mohilitd des feutlles, et tout cet ahandoriy 
simplicity de la nature, attitude des deserts.'' 

The blundering substitution of "cold" for 
"pure" makes a vital difference in the whole con- 
ception. With the phraseology of Keats both 
nature^ and humanity seem to acquire a new- 
dignity; the ocean is pictured as a kindly, helpful 
attendant, like a sweet-faced nurse at a well- 
appointed hospital. Arnold's adjective "cold" 
spoils the whole warm and peaceful effect. The 
mistake is due to a radically defective attitude 
toward the triumphs of modern science. In the 
past century man has gained dominion over the 
sea in a wonderful way, so that he is no longer 
afraid of it as in the old days when he pictured 
it as a dragon or demon. In these days, with due 
precautions, it is as safe to live upon the ocean as 
upon dry land. Some wealthy people are actually 
known to live on a favorite ocean liner plying 
between New York and Southampton. The sea 
is no longer a divider but a unifier. When the 
Panama Canal is completed San Francisco will 
be much closer than before to New York. And 
then how much has science done to make us 
understand the health-giving functions of the sea! 
its ozone-laden breezes; its ability to cool and tem- 
per a whole coast, like that extending from Puget 



42 Matthew Arnold 

Sound to San Diego, or, by its Gulf Stream, to | 
make the shores of Ireland and North Britain } 
habitable. I 

Keats rises to the occasion, and characterizes j 
the ocean as God's ambassador and minister — a 
priest — performing a divine task. With a strangely 
blind conservatism Arnold misses the whole point 
and presents a picture that jars us and makes 
us shiver. He allowed his old-world proclivities 
to master him and to deaden his poetic insight. 
Neopaganism like this has no message for modern 
humanity. 

His great contemporary, the poet-laureate, does 
not fail in this respect. Tennyson is friendly 
to the sea, regarding it as a mighty influence 
beneficent to man. In "In Memoriam" he 
makes the ocean a friend who soothes: 

The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills. 

And in "Enoch Arden" the poet speaks of the 
sea and land as friends — "a roar of the sea when 
he welcomes the land." Even in "Self-Depend- 
ence," where Arnold draws nearer to the sea, 
he links it to the stars in a subordinate way, and 
makes it typical of isolation. The stars and the 
sea, he declares. 



Arnold and French Thought 43 

Unaffrighted by the silence round them, 

Undistracted by the sights they see, 
These demand not that the things without them 

Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. 

And with joy the stars perform their shining. 
And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; 

For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting 
All the fever of some differing soul. 

"Bounded by themselves, and unregardful 
In what state God's other works may be, 

In their own tasks all their powers pouring. 
These attain the mighty life you see. 

How unlike Keats's "priestlike task," or the 
"modern chemistry" recognition of the ozone-filled 
ocean as a great physician and healer! 

"He who is man," remarks Obermann in one 
of his letters, "knows how to love without 
forgetting that love is hut an accident of life." 
This is the root fallacy of his whole outlook. What 
strikes one in reading his pages is the aloofness, 
the absence of other personalities in his life, domi- 
nating him, or being dominated by him. He 
gives an outline of his spiritual career in 
another letter. When he left childhood behind, 
the period that we all regret, he imagined that 
he felt real life; but he found only "fantastic sen- 
sations." He looked on beings, and they were 
only shadows; he longed for harmony, and found 
only contraries. Then he waxed gloomy, and his 



44 Matthew Arnold 

heart grew hollow; with unlimited desires, he felt 
the ennui of life come upon him just when man 
usually begins to live. For a time his restless 
spirit found relief and solace among the Alps; 
the silence and beauty of the lakes and forests 
seemed to realize the longed-for perfection. He 
"heard the sound of another world." But a 
return to the humdrum routine of earth disabused 
him again, ridding him of his "blind faith." He 
could see naught but endless changes, purposeless 
actions, universal impenetrability, in this world 
which we occupy. "Our dreams vanish, and 
what replaces them I Power wearies; pleasure slips 
from our grasp; glory is for our ashes; religion 
is a system for the unhappy. Love had the colors 
of life; but the shadow comes, the rose pales and 
falls to earth, and behold eternal night!" 

This is not healthy sentiment, nor sound philos- 
ophy, but the morbidity of a sick personality, 
requiring sustenance and stimulus from other per- 
sonalities. The word " ennui," ever recurring, has 
no place in the record of a wholesome, well- 
ordered life. All life is indeed change; but, in 
wholesome life, all change has a definite purpose. 
In loving and caring for others we penetrate their 
hearts and discover the real meaning of life. 

Senancour's Obermann was inherently a senti- 
mentalist who spent his days in dreams that came 



Arnold and French Thought 45 

to nothing, in tracing out wishes that could never 
be fulfilled. A call to real activity, the infusion 
of some moral vitality, might, thinks George Sand, 
have converted him into a saint. With his 
incisive Voltairean philosophy, his fondness for 
elegiac moods, his literary perfection of phrase, 
he exercised a fascinating but unhappy influence 
upon Arnold. College and school life — the life 
that Arnold lived — is almost as artificial as that of 
a convent. The dreams and enthusiasms of 
youths and maidens take a literary and ineffective 
shape, and their sorrows are euthanasiac and 
morbid. The very term "academic" has in 
practical life something of the capricious and 
unpractical. The pages of "Obermann" are excel- 
lent pasture for the budding essayist who wants 
to do a finished thing in literary work; but the 
exquisite psychological diagnosis is not to be 
regarded as more than mildly helpful in any virile 
discussion of modern social, philosophical, and 
theological problems. 

A later deliverance, in prose, would seem to 
show that Arnold was fully alive to the singularly 
negative aspect of Senancour's w^hole teaching. 
The passage is to be found in his "Discourses in 
America," where he is dealing with Emerson. He 
quotes a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, wherein 
the writer confesses that the "strong hours con- 



4-6 Matthew Arnold 

qiier him," and that he is the victim of miscellany; 
miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procras- 
tination. "The forlorn note belonging to the 
phrase Vast debility,' " adds Arnold, "recalls 
that saddest and most discouraged of writers, the 
author of *Obermann,' Senancour,* with whom 
Emerson has in truth a certain kinship. He has, 
in common with Senancour, his pureness, his 
passion for nature, his single eye; and here we 
find him confessing, like Senancour, a sense in ; 
himself of sterility and impotence. " I 

Arnold may be considered, then, as treating ] 
Obermann somewhat in the manner of a bitter- | 
sweet tonic, a wholesome alterative. Personally, < 
his mood was optimistic, and he had a surplus of ; 
gladness; as one critic remarks, Arnold's pessi- ] 
mism was not of the feelings but of the under- i 
standing. His real sympathies would probably : 
have allied him to the more hopeful and radiant | 
French school of Idees-Forces, known among j 
English thinkers as Pragmatists. These philoso- 
phers regard the whole world as moving to per- 
fection on the basis of conduct. They carry out | 
Arnold's quaint dictum, "Conduct is three fourths i 
of life," into a systematic philosophy, and teach ', 
that to be is to act; that the whole of life is in the | 

i 

* The spelling "Senancour," found throughout the authorized edition of i 
Arnold's works, has been followed; the actual French form is "Senancour." r 
• — ^Author's Note. \ 



i 



Arnold and French Thought 47 

present; and that the meaning and reason of 
the "all-assuming years" are to be found in the 
potency of to-day. Their ethical system may be 
defined as moral opportunism; for it has no stay 
on a personal God, who has willed things, is 
willing things, and will call upon his creatures, 
some day, to give an account of their stewardship, 
as responsible to him. 



CHAPTER III 

ARNOLD AND WORDSWORTH AS RELIGIOUS 

TEACHERS 

It is impossible to understand or appreciate 
Arnold fully unless we are acquainted with the i 
best work of his predecessor and master, William ' 
Wordsworth. One of the most profoundly sig- ' 
nificant events in the life of the great poet was \ 
when he received the doctor's degree at the Ox- ^ 
ford Commemoration of 1839, amid unusual ! 
plaudits. For, a quarter of a century before, j 
Wordsworth had been scorned as a poetaster 
and literary crank. To none must the apprecia- \ 
tion have come with greater delight than to the j 
Arnolds, father and son, who were sworn ad- ■ 
mirers of the modern prophet of natural religion. J 
It was an act of national approval and confidence, i 

So much of the best in the religious life of pa- j 
ganism did Arnold find in Wordsworth that this 
particular aspect of Wordsworthianism bulks too 
largely in his estimate of the poet's teaching. In 
his essay on Marcus Aurelius, a man whose pure j 
and noble character seemed to him — as it has [ 
done to others, John Wesley among the number — 

to reach a verv pinnacle of greatness, he finds in i 

48 j 



Arnold and Wordsworth 49 

the emperor's outlook on life much to remind him 
of Wordsworth's teachings. Remarking on the 
admixture of sweetness with dignity which makes 
the Roman so beautiful a moralist, Arnold declares 
that it enables him to carry even into his obser- 
vation of nature a delicate penetration, a sympa- 
thetic tenderness, worthy of Wordsworth. The 
spirit of such a remark as the following has hardly 
a parallel, he thinks, in the whole range of 
Greek and Roman literature: 

Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the 
ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to 
rottenness adds a pecuHar beauty to the fruit. And the ears 
of com bending down, and the hon's eyebrows and the foam 
which flows from the mouth of the wild boars, and many 
other things — though they are far from being beautiful, in a 
certain sense — still, because they come in the course of 
nattire, have a beauty in them, and they please the mind; 
so that if a man should have a feeling and a deeper insight 
with respect to the things which are produced in the universe, 
there is hardly anything which comes in the course of nature 
which will not seem to him to be in a manner disposed so as 
to give him pleasure. 

"But it is when his strain passes to directly 
moral subjects," declares Arnold, "that his deli- 
cacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm." 

The other teachers of antiquity whom Arnold 
would raise to a level with modern Christian poets 
at their best are Simonides, Pindar, ^schylus, 
and Sophocles, who lived in a time when it seemed 
to him that "poetry made the noblest, the most 
4 



50 Matthew Arnold j 

successful effort she has ever made as the priestess i 
of the imaginative reason, of the element by which | 
the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly ] 
to live." \ 

Matthew Arnold knew and loved the poets of j 
ancient Greece in an intimate and first-hand way, I 
and his tribute to their greatness is not a conven- | 
tional or artificial one; he felt their power and j 
nobility. On the other hand, his associations with ' 
Wordsworth were singularly close and friendly, j 
and merit a passing notice before proceeding to 
further discussion. 

The Arnolds became immediate neighbors of 
Wordsworth when Matthew was a lad of ten, and 
his holidays were spent in the beautiful lake coun- 
try surrounding Rydal. Rugby, their other home, 
lies in a flat and uninteresting district, and the 
good Doctor was glad to retire for health and 
inspiration to the mountain slopes of West- j 
moreland and Cumberland. "I could still rave 'i 
about Rydal," he says in one of his letters to an 
old college friend; "^'t was a period of five weeks of 
almost awful happiness, absolutely without a cloud; 
and we all enjoyed it, I think, equally — mother, 
father, and fry. Our intercourse with the Words- 
worths was one of the brightest spots of all; 
nothing could exceed their friendliness — and my 
almost daily walks with him were things not to 



Arnold and Wordsworth 51 

be forgotten. . . . We were thinking of buying or 
renting a place at Grasmere or Rydal, to spend 
our holidays at constantly; for not only are the 
Wordsworths and the scenery a very great attrac- 
tion, but as I had the chapel at Rydal all the time 
of our last visit I got acquainted with the poorer 
people*besides." 

Matthew was the largest of the "fry," and was 
drinking in everything, no doubt. Next New 
Year's Day the father writes: "New Year's Day 
is in this part of the country regarded as a great 
festival, and we have had prayers this morning 
even in our village chapel at Rydal. May God 
bless us in all our doings in the year that is now 
begun, and make us increase more and more in 
the knowledge and love of himself and of his Son; 
that it may be blessed to us, whether we live to see 
the end of it on earth or no. " This was the simple 
Christian assurance of Thomas Arnold, shared 
by his friend William Wordsworth, that the life 
on earth is continued in heaven. How far his 
son was to travel from this "illusion" it is my 
purpose in this chapter to show. 

Before the year was out the Arnolds were 
established in a house of their own which became 
associated with their name. "The Wordsworths' 
friendship, for so I may call it," writes Dr. 
Arnold to a pupil, *'is certainly one of the greatest 



52 Matthew Arnold 

delights of Fox How — the name of my place — and 
their kindness in arranging everything in our j 
absence has been very great." And references j 
recur later in his letters testifying to his intimate ] 
friendship with the great poet. j 

The son, then, grew up among Lake School j 
associations, and essentially in sympathy with ! 
the great exponent of its principles. In political { 
matters, it is true, the somewhat ironbound con- I 
servatism of Wordsworth was directly opposed J 
to the liberalism of the two Arnolds. But their ; 
ideals of conduct and of life were in harmony; 
they respected and revered the pure and sacred 
traditions of the English home and family. 

When Wordsworth died, in 1850, Matthew 
Arnold seized the occasion to write "Memorial I 
Verses," in which he (^ontrasted the dead poet | 
with Goethe and Byron, not to his disadvantage. | 
"Time," he declared, "may restore us in his ^ 
course the sage mind of Goethe and the force ! 
of Byron; but where will a later Europe again find \ 
the healing power of Wordsworth ?" Here is his j 
appreciation: 

And Wordsworth! — Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice T 
For never has such soothing voice 
Been to your shadowy world conveyed 
Since erst, at mom, some wandering shade 
Heard the clear song of Orpheus come 
Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. 






Arnold and Wordsworth 53 

Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye, 
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! 
He too upon a wintry clime 
Had fallen — on this iron time 
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. 
He found us when the age had bound 
Our sovls in its benumbing round ; 
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
He laid us as we lay at birth 
" On the cool flowery path of earth: 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o'er the sunlit fields again; 
Oiu" foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
Our youth returned ; for there was shed 
On spirits that had long been dead, 
Spirits dried up and closely fiirled. 
The freshness of the early world. 

These lines have received, and justly, great praise. 
But are they an adequate appreciation ? Is Arnold 
justified in eliminating the Christian element in 
Wordsworth, and confining his vocabulary and ref- 
erences entirely to what is pagan ? Surely W^ords- 
worth's best work was distinctly Christian. Let us 
compare this appreciation with that of the Quaker 
poet: 

WHITTIER ON WORDSWORTH 

Dear friends who read the world aright — 
And in its common forms discern 

A beauty and a harmony 
The many never learn! 

Kindred in soul of him who found 
In simple flower and leaf and stone 

The impulse of the sweetest lays 
Our Saxon tongue has known — 



54 Matthew Arnold 

Accept this record of a life 

As sweet and pure, as calm and good, 
As a long day of blandest June 

In green field and in wood. 

How welcome to our ears, long pained 
By strife of sect and party noise, 

The brooklike murmur of his sons: 
Of natiure's simple joys! 

The violet by its mossy stone. 
The primrose by the river's brim. 

And chance-sown daffodil have found 
Immortal life through him. 

The sunrise on his breezy lake. 

The rosy tints his sunset brought. 

World-seen, are gladdening all the vales 
And mountain peaks of thought. 

Art builds on sand; the works of pride 
And human passion change and fall; 

But that which shares the life of God 
With him surviveth all. 



A close comparison of these studies will, I think, 
reveal the fact that Whittier gives us more of the 
atmosphere of Wordsworth than does Arnold — 
leaving questions of poetical excellence apart. 
Arnold recognizes in the poet a physician of the 
soul who for the time being made life more 
worth living; one who brought back the Greek 
delight in the outer world and the forms of leaf 
and flower; who made the fields sunlit again. But 
is there not in this appreciation the defect noted 
by Arnold's own father — the mere artistic 



Arnold and Wordsworth 55 

attitude toward the world ? Surely Words- 
worth's message was not simply a lullaby which 
soothes a fretful child and makes him smile and 
forget. Did he shirk the darker problems of 
life and give no answer to its questions — merely 
"putting these things by" ? 

Wojrdsworth, according to Whittier, is enjoyed 
by the favored few who read the world aright; 
and this final word is characteristic of his whole 
outlook as distinguished from Arnold's; he read 
the world as it ought to be read by all who 
know and feel the truth. The Quaker poet claims 
for Wordsworth's teaching an essential rightness 
and final truth. Arnold's tribute is more aesthetic 
or artistic; it is fanciful and literary. It refers us 
to the song of Orpheus and the life of ancient 
Greece — to the "freshness of the earlier world." 
Whittier asserts far more than Arnold; he dwells 
on the final harmony which Wordsworth revealed 
not only in his poetry but in his life. This was a 
gift to the world, conferred upon it not by a mere 
artist but by a believer and a devotee who shared 
in God's life. Whittier ends his tribute with a 
reference to the personality of God and the pres- 
ence in the world of the divine life. Wordsworth 
gave us, he asserts, not an anodyne, but spiritual 
food. 

The lovers of Wordsworth find him at his best 



56 Matthew Arnold 

in his "Intimations of Immortality from Recollec- 
tions of Childhood," the loftiest strain the poet ever 
uttered. Here we have the "full, the perfect 
Wordsworth, . . . informed and chastened by an 
intense sense of human conduct, of reverence and 
almost of humbleness, displayed in the utmost 
poetic felicity." When Wordsworth spoke of 
finding strength 

In the soothing thoughts that spring 

Out of human suffering, 

In the faith that looks through death, 

he was not using mere phrases for the purposes of 
artistic effect; he spoke as a believer. He consid- 
ered, and rightly, that the hope of immortality 
was the sheet anchor of our faith. The sixth 
book of his "Excursion" describes a typical village 
pastor who ministers faithfully to his jflock : 

Exalting tender themes, by just degrees 

To lofty raised ; and to the highest, last ; 

The head and mighty paramount of truths — 

Immortal life in never-fading worlds, 

For mortal creatures, conquered and secured. 

To Arnold, Wordsworth seemed often inspired 
in the most direct way. "Nature herself seems," 
he remarks in his essay on Wordsworth, "to take 
the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with 
her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This 
arises from two causes: from the profound sin- 



Arnold and Wordsworth 57 

cereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, 
and also from the profoundly sincere and natural 
character of his subject itself." And yet he had 
but a qualified admiration for the great Ode, as 
"not wholly free from something declamatory," 
this poem which Professor Saintsbury, in a passage 
just quoted, terms the expression of "the full and 
perfect Wordsworth." It seemed to Arnold to be 
based on an "illusion," the illusion of immor- 
tality. A few words on illusions. 

It is astonishing how frequently this word 
"illusion" recurs in modern French ethical discus- 
sion, becoming, indeed, a kind of key\vord. As 
interpreted by a certain school of thinkers, with 
whom Arnold was more or less in sympathy, the 
universe is material and eternal — the great solid 
fact. This material world throws off from it 
human beings who possess the wonderful power 
of contemplating it; but they pass away like the 
morning vapor. The only permanent thing these 
minds can do is to help other minds, present 
and to come, to contemplate the universe in the 
most lucid and serviceable way. On what 
principle ? On the principle of getting most hap- 
piness or satisfaction out of it. What kind of 
happiness or satisfaction ? The old Epicurean 
happiness of sense pleasures, as refined and pro- 
longed as possible; or the old Stoic satisfaction 



58 Matthew Arnold 

of will-worship, the satisfaction of having real- 
ized ourselves. 

Listen to one French poet speaking of another 
— the gifted Gautier: "A noble poet is dead. ' 
Regrets ? But what then is the death of a man ] 
but the vanishing of one of our dreams ? Men, ,1 
whom we believe real, are but the triste opacity de | 
leurs spectres futurs. But the poet, beyond his 
vain physical existence, lives for us a high, im- 
perishable life. The poet is a solemn agitation of 
words; the death of a poet purifies our fiction of 
nn. 

This means that human personality is inferior 
and subsidiary to the general ideas or utterances 
to which it gives birth and expression; that person- 
alities are mere bubbles, so to speak, on the waters j 
of time. It means that this physical existence \ 
is mere vanity and emptiness, an emanation of { 
matter, and that its supremely useful result is to | 
formulate ideas for the benefit of future ages, j 
The horizon is the horizon of the world; the only 
theater of action and of interest is the stage of the : 
v/orld. 

Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth, as we have ■ 
seen, makes use of this keyword, "illusion;" de- | 
daring that Wordsworth's philosophy is illusion | 
and unsound; that *' the ^intimations' of the famous 
Ode, those corner stones of the supposed philo- ] 



Arnold and Wordsworth 59 

sophic system of Wordsworth, . . . have no 
real solidity." And yet, in the same essay, 
when comparing him with Theophile Gautier, he 
declares that Wordsworth surpasses the French- 
man because he deals with life so powerfully. 
Could Wordsworth have dealt powerfully with 
life if his doctrine had been illusory .? Is this a 
tenable theory ? Is it not rank heresy — the belief 
that truth can be reared on falsehood ? Ex 
falso falsum; ex vero verum. 

Arnold has no use for revivals, or for the plat- 
form and street-preacher's appeal. In the preface 
to his "Culture and Anarchy" he talks somewhat 
superciliously of "earnest young men conceiving 
of salvation in the old Puritan fashion, and flinging 
themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways 
of this fashion, which we know so well, and such 
as Mr. Hammond, the American revivalist, has 
lately at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle been refresh- 
ing our memory with." Compare this attitude 
of his with that of Wordsworth, writing seventy 
years before. When Wordsworth, whose "Peter 
Bell" was composed as early as 1798, introduced 
into the story a scene in a Methodist chapel he 
was writing as an outsider and a literary man 
whose object was to interpret life. Methodist 
preachers were then the butt of ordinary men 
of letters, even of churchmen like Sydney 



6o Matthew Arnold 

Smith. So late as 1808 the witty canon contrib- 
uted an article to the Edinburo;h Review in which 1 
he spoke of Methodist itinerants as vermin to be \ 
"caught, killed, and cracked" — in a superfine, ^ 
literary fashion, of course — by the patent pumps ; 
of Edinburgh Reviewers! We ought then to t 
admire the moral courage shown by Wordsworth \ 
in depicting Peter Bell as he did — a man to whose j 
wounded spirit a Methodist preacher brought \ 
healing: j 

Calm is the well-deserving brute, 1 

His peace has no offense betrayed ; ^ 

But now, while down that slope he wends, | 

A voice to Peter's ear ascends, ■ ] 

» Resounding from the woody glade: ' 

The voice, though clamorous as a horn | 

Reechoed by a native rock, i 

Comes from that tabernacle — List ! ■ 

Within, a fervent Methodist ' 

Is preaching to his flock! 

The appeal to his better nature, and the offer j 

of salvation, proved too much for Peter, who \ 

melted into tears — i 

i 

Sweet tears of hope and tenderness! ' 
And fast they fell, a plenteous shov/er! 

His nerves, his sinews seemed to melt; 

Through all his iron frame was felt i 

A gentle, a relaxing power! ! 

In the prefatory note attached to the 18 18 I 

edition of the poem occurs this passage: "The ^ 



Arnold and Wordsworth 6i 

worship of the Methodists or Ranters is often 
heard during the stillness of the summer evening 
in the country, with affecting accompaniments 
of rural beauty. In both the psalmody and the 
voice of the preacher there is, not infrequently, 
much solemnity likely to impress the feelings of 
the rudest character under favorable circum- 
stances." 

My object in quoting these passages is to show 
that Wordsworth's world, to which he transports 
us for comfort, happiness, and healing, is no old 
pagan world, haunted by nymphs and satyrs, and 
studded with mystic shrines, but a world hallowed 
by Christian worship and echoing the Christian 
message. These were the words of the preacher 
which struck conviction to Peter's heart: 

"Repent! repent!" he cries aloud, 

"While yet ye may find mercy; — strive 

To love the Lord with all yotir might ; 

Turn to Him, seek Him day and night, 
And save your soul alive! " 

Wordsworth accepted Methodism in its entirety 
as a beneficent influence, while allowing for the 
deficiencies that accompany all popular move- 
ments; he did not register his inconsistency as 
Matthew Arnold did, by honoring Wesley and 
despising Wesley's life's work. 

We know that Coleridge had a profound 
admiration for the character of Wesley, and sug- 



62 Matthew Arnold 

gested to Southey the advisability of undertaking 
the biography. Deep, indeed, ought to be the 
gratitude of Methodists to Robert Southey for the 
service he rendered to the cause of truth in giving 
John Wesley his proper place in the world's 
estimation. When all deductions are made from 
its excellences, Southey's " Life of Wesley " re- 
mains, to use the term applied to it by a recent 
Methodist biographer, a "beautiful" book. 

Through his father, Southey, and the Words- 
worths Arnold inherited a high respect for 
Wesley; but he is careful to limit his admiration 
to Wesley the English Churchman. **The fruitful 
men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity," 
he remarks in the preface to his "Culture and 
Anarchy," "were trained within the pale of the 
Establishment — Milton, Baxter, Wesley." For the 
gospel message of Wesley and his followers he has 
scant respect; witness what he says in the preface 
to "God and the Bible": 

"I heard Mr. Moody preach to one of his vast 
audiences on a topic eternally attractive — salvation 
by Jesus Christ. Mr. Moody's account was exactly 
the old (Methodist) story, to which I have often 
adverted, of the contract in the Council of the 
Trinity. Justice puts in her claim, said Mr. 
Moody, for the punishment of guilty mankind; 
God admits it. Jesus intercedes, undertakes 



Arnold and Wordsworth 63 

to bear their punishment, and signs an undertak- 
ing to that effect. Thousands of years pass; 
Jesus is on the cross on Calvary. Justice appears, 
and presents to him his signed undertaking. Jesus 
accepts it, bows his head, and expires. Christian 
salvation consists in the undoubted belief in the 
transaction here described, and in the hearty 
acceptance of the release offered by it. 

"Never let us deny to this story power and 
pathos, or treat with hostility ideas which have 
entered so deep into the life of Christendom. 
But the story is not true; it never really happened. 
These personages never did meet together, and 
speak and act in the manner related. The 
personages in the Christian heaven and their 
conversations are no more matter of fact than 
the personages of the Greek Olympus and their 



conversations. " 



Notice the unfair logical step which Arnold 
takes in this rehearsal. He treats a mere personi- 
fication, Justice, as a supposed real person, 
accepted as such by Mr. Moody and his fellow 
Christians, and then banishes God, Jesus Christ, 
and the personified Justice to the limbo of shadows 
as all equally unreal. "Salvation by Jesus Christ, 
therefore," continues he, "// it has any reality, 
must be placed somewhere else than in a hearty 
consent to Mr. Moody's ( ?) story. " 



i 



64 Matthew Arnold 

Writing to his mother at the close of 186 1, when 
the Mason and Slidell case had strained matters 
almost to the breaking point between Britain and 
the United States, Arnold shows how little he is in 
sympathy with Evangelicals in either country: 
"Every one I see is very warlike. I myself think 
that it has become indispensable to give the 
Americans a moral lesson, and fervently hope it 
will be given them; but I am still inclined to think 
that they will take their lesson without war. 
However, people keep saying they won't. The 
most remarkable thing is that that feeling of sym- i 
pathy with them (based very much on the ground \ 
of their common radicalness, dissentingness, and ^^ 
general mixture of self-assertion and narrowness) 
which I thought our middle classes entertained I 
seems to be so much weaker than was to be ;| 
expected. I always thought it was this sympathy, ! 
and not cotton, that kept our government from ; 
resenting their insolences, for I don't imagme I 
the feeling of kinship with them exists at all among ; 
the higher classes; after immediate blood relation- i 
ship the relationship of the Soul is the only ] 
important thing, and this one has far more with 
the French, Italians, or Germans than with the I 
Americans." ' i\ 

A passage like this, revealing his aloofness from I 
middle-class "meetinghouse" people, goes far to '\ 



^ 









Arnold and Wordsworth 65 

explain his lack of success as the apostle of a new 
creed, reducing God to an impersonal tendency 
that makes for righteousness, A sentence like 
the following puts the whole matter in a nutshell: 
"Those who, like Christian philosophers in general, 
begin by admitting that of the constitution of God 
we know nothing, and who add, even, that ' we 
are utterly powerless to conceive or comprehend 
the idea of an infinite Being, Almighty, All- 
knowing, Omnipotent, and Eternal, of whose 
inscrutable purpose the material universe is the 
unexplained manifestation,' but then proceed 
calmly to affirm such a Being as positively as if he 
were a man they were acquainted with in the next 
street, talk idly." And yet such a conviction 
of the nearness of God to every one of us, of 
the immediacy of his dealings with human hearts, 
of his pleading with us like a father, lies at the root 
of all experimental Christianity. It is the hall- 
mark of a living hymnology, the essence of revival 
fervor. In his "Peter Bell" Wordsworth con- 
fesses that this attitude of conviction is harmonious 
with all nature, and that the sudden realization 
of God's power and mercy as revealed in the gospel 
story can change a ruffian into a man clothed and 
in his right mind. But to Matthew Arnold all 
this is phantasmagorial, fallacious, misleading. 
Yet surely out of truth comes truth. These 

5 



66 Matthew Arnold 

Christian beliefs and sympathies inspired Words- 
worth to write the noblest of his odes, possibly the 
noblest ode in the language. Can we, in estimating 
Wordsworth aright, calmly place these convictions 
aside, and coolly rank the poet with an ancient 
Greek pagan ? Arnold's odd attempts at theology 
led him into strange inconsistencies and asser- 
tions of impossibilities, which merit some rough 
handling. 

In his lines " To a Gypsy Child by the Seashore" 
Arnold reveals how profoundly he was impressed 
by Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality; the poem, 
indeed, is not fully intelligible unless we are 
familiar with the earlier lyric. A better title for 
the Ode, perhaps, would be, not "Intimations of 
Immortality irovn. Recollections of Childhood," but 
"Intimations of Eternality from Recollections of 
Childhood.'* Immortality merely implies conti- 
nuity of the life begun here; the survival of the 
personality after the death of the body. But 
Wordsworth's "Immortality" deals with a pro- 
longation of life backward; a prenatal existence. 
He argues that the soul comes down from heaven as 
well as returns thither; that the child, when born 
into the world, gradually forgets the glory of a 
world which he has just left. The young human 
soul comes " not in entire forgetfulness, and not in 
utter nakedness," but like a "trailing cloud of 



Arnold and Wordsworth 67 

glory from God." It comes with a benediction 
for humanity, with an innate attraction toward 
goodness and purity. These passages in the Ode 
remind the reader of the words of our Saviour: 
"Except ye be converted, and become as Httle 
children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
heaven. " Its opening words are : 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth and every common sight 
To me did seem 
Appareled in celestial light ; 

which means that childhood was a time when the 
poet felt close to heaven. This introductory pas- 
sage breathes the fragrance of the exquisitely 
pure domestic life of England at the close of the 
eighteenth century. It is not Wordsworth alone 
w^ho speaks in this strain. To John Henry New- 
man, trained in a thoroughly Puritan English 
home, the people around him in his early child- 
hood appeared as angels, not earthborn but visit- 
ants from heaven. "I thought life might be a 
dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, 
my fellow angels by a playful device concealing 
themselves from me, and deceiving me with the 
semblance of a material world." We are so apt 
to think of the Puritan theology of a hundred 
years ago — those Puritans who, according to 
Matthew Arnold, "knew not God," that is, his 



68 Matthew Arnold 

God of sweetness and light — as terrorizing chil- 
dren with the horrors of hell, that we forget the 
obverse side of the shield, the happy heaven that 
was ever made present to them. Sin was then 
recognized as so repulsive in its every aspect that 
children in well-ordered households lived in 
an atmosphere steeped in duty and purity. 
Their later intercourse with the world blunted 
this simple, exquisite, spontaneous delight in the 
world of phenomena which God looked upon at 
creation and declared very good. 

Wordsworth did not teach this theory of a pre- 
natal existence as a doctrine; indeed, he expressly 
rejected so definite an attitude. But he regarded 
the theory as harmonious with the best Christian 
aspirations and beliefs, and full of suggestive com- 
fort. In any case, the child world he depicted is 
the child world of the Christian home. 

Arnold dallies with the prenatal conception in 
his lines "To a Gypsy Child." Unlike Words- 
worth's happy lad, who is so full of the light 
and the life whence it flows that he is rapturous 
with joy and shouts with delight, this little gypsy is 
pensive and moody; "clouds of doom are massed 
round that slight brow:" 

Down the pale cheek long lines of shadow slope, 

Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give. 

— Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope, 
Foreseen thy harvest, yet proceed'st to live. 



Arnold and Wordsworth 69 

meek anticipant of that sure pain 

Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn! 
What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain? 

What heavens, what earth, what suns shalt thou discern ? 

Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star, 
Match that funereal aspect with her pall, 

1 think thou wilt have fathomed life too far, 

Have known too much — or else forgotten all. 

The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil 

Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps; 
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale 

Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps. 

Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use. 

Not daily labor's dull, Lethean spring, 
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse 

Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing. 

The poet addresses her as if she were an angel 
born again into an alien planet; one destined to 
have some stray gleams of sunshine in her passage 
through this stormy world, and to win some few 
prizes in the struggle of life; but yet likely to be 
blinded by the " black sunshine," to lose her 
pristine grace, and to relearn but little of the 
Wisdom that was formerly her birthright. Earthly 
life would finally prove not worth living: 

Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern, 
Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain ! 

Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return, 
And wear this majesty of grief again. 

This is Wordsworthianism conceived in a con- 
trary way: childhood as a period of pensive sad- 



70 Matthew Arnold 

ness; the experiences of life, not as furnishing us 
with "a faith that looks through death," but with 
materials to wrap our brows in gloom and make us 
feel that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. A 
natural result of eliminating from religious faith 
and belief the bright hopes and assurances which 
are woven into our historic creeds, and are essen- 
tial to our spiritual well-being! 



\ 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MIRROR AND THE CUP 

Poets in every age have been fond of insuring 
dramatic intensity by throwing their own senti- 
ments into some historic personage, who becomes 
their mouthpiece. The perspective thus obtained 
allows their audiences to see truth more clearly, 
away from the disguising and distorting mists 
and shadows of the present. People are thus led, 
unconsciously, to assent to opinions which they 
feel to be true before they grasp the immediate 
practical import, which might have predisposed 
their wills unfavorably. Arnold has made use of 
this device. His historic mouthpiece, as might 
be expected, is a Greek, a keen, lucid thinker, who 
knows the value of the phrase "Meden agan" 
("Nothing too much"). The hymn of life which 
Empedocles sings in the drama "Empedocles on 
Etna" to a harp accompaniment is of intense 
psychological interest to us, as embodying the 
poet's own musings and findings on the problem 
of existence. We must, of course, allow for the 
"grain of salt,'' the quantum of dramatic simu- 
lation; but substantially the reader must feel that 
the voice that speaks in these stanzas is the voice 
of Matthew Arnold. 

71 



72 Matthew Arnold 

The counterpart in Browning is "Rabbi Ben 
Ezra," the closing message of the Hebrew teacher, 
full of sweet sententiousness. I have called the 



i 



Greek teacher's message the Mirror, this being ( 
the simile with which the poem opens: | 

The outspread world to span, 

A cord the gods first slung, 
And then the soul of man 

There, like a mirror, hung, 
And bade the winds through space impel the gusty toy. 

Hither and thither spins 

The wind-borne mirroring soul, 

A thousand glimpses wins, 

And never sees a whole ; 

Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last em- I 

ploy. I 

It is a Greek simile, which carries us back to : 

Plato and Platonism. The broad-browed philoso- j 

pher states that man has many ways of creating • 

things, none quicker than that of turning a mirror ! 

round and round — you could soon have the sun, | 

and the heaven, and the earth, and yourself, and I 

the animals and plants in the mirror. But the i 

result is evanescence and illusion — all such crea- ) 

tion is vanity and vexation of spirit. | 

To Browning's lyric I have given the name the 
Cup, as embodying his final conception of life. 

Here we have not the Greek lucidity, but the ^ 

Hebrew warmth and energy; existence, not merely > 

in terms of vision, which Aristotle and othef j 



The Mirror and the Cup 73 

Greek thinkers so greatly overestimated as a gate- 
way of truth, but in terms of the whole being. 
The typical man is conceived as in sympathetic 
association with his fellows, finally sitting down 
with them at the Master's feast: 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 
WlTy time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 

Thou, to whom fools propotmd, 

When the wine makes its round, 
*' Since life fleets, all is change ; the Past gone, seize to-day! " 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be: 
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

He fixed thee 'mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance. 
This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent. 
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves, 

Which ran the laughing loves 
Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

Look not thou down but up ! 

To uses of a cup, 
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal. 

The new wine's foaming flow. 

The Master's lips aglow! 
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou 
with earth's wheel? 



74 Matthew Arnold 

The metaphor of the Potter and the Wheel was 
particularly distasteful to Arnold, and he rejects 
its applicability to a sweet and reasonable system 
of religious thought like Christianity. In his 
treatise on "Saint Paul and Protestantism" he pro- 
tests against its use by the great apostle. "It might 
seem," he remarks, "as if the word purpose lured 
him [Paul] on into speculative mazes, and involved 
him at last in an embarrassment from which he 
impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedi- 
fying image of the clay and the potter. But 
this is not so. . . . He was led into difficulty by 
the tendency which we have already noticed as 
making his real imperfection both as a thinker 
and as a writer — the tendency to Judaize." 
Arnold goes on to say that Calvinists have 
made out of this analogy the fundamental idea 
of their theology; which with Paul was a mere 
addition, extraneous to the essentials of his 
teaching, and brought in for mere rhetorical 
purposes. "It is as if Newton had intro- 
duced into his exposition of the law of gravita- 
tion an incidental statement, perhaps erroneous, 
about light or colors; and we were then to make 
this statement the head and front of Newton's 
law." Arnold calls it a stock theological figure 
found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Apocrypha. 

All of which argument is an illogical and 



The Mirror and the Cup 75 

impossible attempt to show that we can separate 
the higher teaching of Saint Paul from that which 
Arnold chooses to term " Judaizing." "Take 
Paul's truly essential idea," he exclaims: "'We 
are buried with Christ through baptism into death, 
that like as he was raised up from the dead by 
the glory of the Father, even so we also shall walk 
in newness of life/ Did Jeremiah say that ? 
Is anyone the author of it except Paul ? Then 
there should Calvinism have looked for Paul's 
secret, and not in the commonplace about the 
potter and the vessels of wrath." 

That the metaphor will bear lofty spiritualizing, 
suited to our modern needs and aspirations, is 
abundantly shown by Browning's elaboration of it 
in his "Rabbi Ben Ezra." A vessel in the hand of 
the workman, being fashioned for further untold 
service, differs in potency and value from a mere 
brittle mirror passive in the hold of inanimate 
forces. Personality is strengthened, not weakened, 
or effaced, by coming under the influence of higher 
personality, to be fashioned and used; but person- 
ality made the tool of the inanimate means the 
greater harnessed to the less, and so degraded. 
Consequently Browning's analogy is full of the 
expansiveness of wondrous possibilities; Arnold's 
is contracted by the chill breath of resignation to 
the inevitable. 



76 Matthew Arnold 

The meters in which the two poems are thrown, 
as the best vehicle for the emotional condition of 
poet and reader in sympathy, are to a certain 
degree remarkably similar, each containing four 
trimeters and a closing hexameter; a "rolling," 
surging close at once final in its effect and 
yet preparatory. The impression resembles 
that made by a long wave breaking upon the 
sand, and lingering; it retreats only to make 
way for a series of shorter and less resonant 
waves. 

But notice the fuller music of Browning's 
stanza. The syllables in Browning's six lines 
run 6, 6, 10, 6, 6, 12; while those in Arnold's five 
lines run 6, 6, 6, 6, 12. In Browning's stanza 
the preliminary expansion in the third line prepares 
for and increases the expansive value of the final 
sixth line, giving a swinging, happy movement to 
the whole stanza : 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 

All I could never be, 

All men ignored in me. 
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped. 

In Arnold's stanza there is a repression char- 
acteristic of the poet's whole treatment, and 
more consistent with the particular theme he 



The Mirror and the Cup 77 

treats. Empedocles is about to take his own 
life: 

The weary man, the banished citizen, 
Whose banishment was not his greatest ill, 
Whose weariness no energy could reach. 
And for whose hurt courage was not the cure — 
What should he do with life and living more ? 

The four short lines of six syllables in the hymn 
stanza, succeeding one another without break, 
have a chilling effect; and, when the rolling hex- 
ameter follows, it swells rather in contrast with 
the previous trimeters than as a resultant expan- 
sion. The actual effect is therefore not really 
expansive, but semicynical: 

Is this, Pausanias, so? 

And can our souls not strive, 
But with the winds must go. 

And hurry where they drive ? 
Is fate indeed so strong, man's strength indeed so poor? 

Browning's stanza, on the contrary, makes the 
two trimeters subordinate in each case to the 
pentameter and to the hexameter, in an upward 
movement, continuous and progressive: 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage — 
Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 
From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 

Browning's stanza is a natural vehicle for his 
optimistic hymn of hopefulness and trust; Arnold's 



78 Matthew Arnold 

for an emotion less hopeful, tinged with disap- 
pointment, distrustful of the future, anxious 
regarding "the something after death." The 
intellectual light burns clear; it searches the 
heart like modern X-rays; warmth there is none 
in the organic whole. The luckless sage, before 
he takes the fatal plunge into the glowing crater, 
envies the mountain its heat and fire. We feel 
that we have here the uttered aspirations of a 
"soul which may perish from cold." Of course, 
the utterance is not Arnold's, any more than Ham- 
let's soliloquy, " To be or not to be," is Shake- 
speare's final utterance on life; but it is Arnold as 
a merciless criticof the illusions of life, Arnold the 
moral physician diagnosing mankind and having 
no panacea to offer. In the interpretation of 
the individuality which he chose in this present 
case, and in the form of interpretation which he 
saw fit to put upon the individuality — for Em- 
pedocles is a somewhat misty personage histor- 
ically — the force and excellence of his genius is 
made apparent. Apart from the dramatic con- 
ditions, however, his limitations appear; for, the 
Empedocles diagnosis over, we ask. What had 
Arnold himself to offer to make life worth living .? 
Was he much better off than the old Greek .? 

Arnold is never weary of dwelling upon the 
limitations of the Hebraic conception of life, and 



The Mirror and the Cup 79 

recommending an Hellenic course of treatment 
for the modern Pharisee, unfortunately born 
Wesleyan or Baptist, and fond of the tub of Dis- 
sent. The dark complexion of Browning, the 
rounded contour of his face, the glowing eyes, 
the curved and full nose, have led many to suspect 
Jewish^ancestry; but an investigation of his ances- 
tral stock yields no evidence whatever of such 
descent. Yet, in his translation of himself into 
Rabbi Ben Ezra, the Hebrew sage of a thousand 
years ago, he has approved the felicity of his choice 
of a medium. Throughout the poem there is all the 
glow of Hebrew moral emotion; man treated as 
the friend of God, who has shepherded him and 
will finally bring him into the fold, the eternal 
home of warmth and love. 

Arnold's was a different nature. The square 
face, the thin lips, the straight, narrow nose, sug- 
gest nicety and precision and restraint, rather 
than full-blooded delight in life. He resembles 
the wise physician, anxious above all things to hold 
no false hopes that may misguide the patient and 
wreck his career; reticent, self-contained, keen in 
vision. 

And yet both strove to interpret at once the 
Hebrew and the Greek genius. We have 
"Balaustion's Adventures" from the pen of 
Browning, and Arnold's prose treatises on Isaiah 



8o Matthew Arnold 

and the Psalms. But it was rather as an admiring I 
critic than as one wholly in sympathy, even for 
the time being, with Hebrew ideals that Arnold | 
wrote concerning biblical events and characters; | 
hence he chose a prose medium in their handling, i 
Browning's *'A Death in the Desert" has an i 
element of complete poetic absorption in the treat- j 
ment, which demands a poetic instead of a prose ; 
form. 

No investigation of a literary kind would be : 
likely to produce more valuable results than a | 
comparison between Browning and Arnold in j 
respect to their temperaments, methods, and j 
principles of life. Happily, in regard to their I 
manner of life, they were alike; though geniuses, ' 
they were well-bred, honorable, and high-minded j 
gentlemen; as Arnold said of his brother-in-law, ! 
W. E. Forster/' integer vitae, scelerisque purus.'* \ 

Both Rabbi Ben Ezra and Empedocles are 
historic names used for poetic interpretation \ 
rather than historic personages. The real Em- ] 
pedocles, so far as we can speak at all about him, i 
was a very different man from the poet's creation. | 
Instead of advocating the calm of resignation, as ; 
the teaching which ought to be enforced by the \ 
wise man who, having seen life, has been dis- j 
illusioned, he appears to have been somewhat ' 
of a popular hero with a craving for distinction, j 



The Mirror and the Cup 8i 

That he lost his life through an act of vainglorious 
bravado is a fable, but it shoves how he has been 
estimated. The following are the facts of his 
career: 

Born in the island of Sicily in the fifth century 
B. C, in the flourishing town of Agrigentum, then 
a forrnidable rival of Syracuse, he espoused, though 
himself of noble birth, the cause of the democratic 
party. Like all early philosophers, he spent 
much of his time in traveling, and seems to have 
learned in the East something of magic and medi- 
cine. He gained a wonderful reputation as a 
prophet and miracle-worker, and assumed a 
special dress — priestly garments, a golden girdle, 
the Delphic crown. Wherever he went he was ac- 
companied by a train of attendants, and men con- 
sidered him divine. His death being wrapped 
in mystery, fables grew up to account for it. 
According to one story, he was drawn up to heaven, 
like Elijah, immediately after some sacred celebra- 
tion. The more popular version pictured him as- 
having flung himself into the crater of Mount 
Etna in order that he might pass for a god; but 
one of his brazen sandals being thrown up 
revealed the secret. 

His teaching has been summed up thus by 
George Henry Lewes: He recognized two prin- 
ciples. Love, the formative principle, and Hate, 



82 Matthew Arnold 

the destructive. Strife is the parent of all things; 
but it in no way disturbs the abode of the gods, 
and operates only on the theater of the world. 
For, inasmuch as Man is a fallen and perverted 
god, doomed to wander on the face of the earth, 
sky-aspiring but sense-clouded, so may Hate be 
only perverted Love struggling through space. 
His conception of God, the One, was that of a 
sphere in the bosom of the harmony fixed in calm 
rest, gladly rejoicing. This quiescent sphere, 
which is Love, exists above and around the moral 
world. 

We find in the whole portraiture of the man no 
touch of that world melancholy, that lack of 
blitheness, which characterizes the Empedocles 
of Arnold's hymn. Indeed, Arnold's conception 
is hardly consistent with itself. The calm lucidity 
of the hymn yields no hint of that pretentiousness 
in dress and social ambition which appear later 
in the drama, when, in a passion of disgust with 
humanity, the sage throws away the golden circlet, 
the purple robe, the laurel bough: 

This envious, miserable age I 

I am weary of it. 

— Lie there, ye ensigns 

Of my unloved preeminence 

In an age like this! 

Among a people of children, 

Who thronged me in their cities, 

Who worshiped me in their houses, 



The Mirror and the Cup S^ 

And asked, not wisdom, 

But drugs to charm with, 

But spells to mutter — 

All the fool's armory of magic! Lie there, 

My golden circlet, 

My purple robe! 

The Empedocles of the hymn, as Arnold 
outlines him, is a calm, impartial diagnoser 
of humanity such as Goethe was. Man's 
intellect critically inspecting humanity — what 
does the combination give us ? The gods are 
removed and apart; the sun shines, and fortune 
smiles, upon the just and the unjust; what is 
immortal and invisible may be set aside and 
neglected because of its uncertainty; only the 
intellect and society remain. Let us regulate 
our desires and adjust our efforts to our pos- 
sibilities : 

For those who know 
Themselves, who wisely take 
Their way through life, and bow 
To what they cannot break, 
Why should I say that life need yield but moderate 
bliss? 

In Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" we have a 
personal God acting immediately on the human 
soul; these are the two facts of existence. The 
intellect is seemingly neglected, being lumped with 
the bodily powers, and the perplexed world of 
nature and society is relegated to a secondary 



84 Matthew Arnold i 

j 

place; 'tis merely Time's wheel which runs back j 
or stops — Potter and clay endure: 

i 

He fixed thee 'mid this dance i 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: i 

Machinery jtist meant .; 

To give thy soul its bent, 1 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. | 

There is outlined here, as ideal, no pyramid of j 
life, complete and stately and statesmanlike, such j 
as Goethe dreamed of and Arnold hankered after. ^ 
"The desire," wrote the German Lavater, "to ' 
raise the pja'amid of my existence — the base of ; 
which is already laid — as high as possible in the 1 
air absorbs every other desire and scarcely ever j 
quits me." Immortality thus ceases to be an ] 
immediate issue; it is neglected as remote, with 
few bearings on present conduct; in the words of 
the hymn : 

Is it so small a thing 

To have enjoyed the sun — 



That we must feign a bliss 
Of doubtful future date, 
And, while we dream on this, 
Lose all our present state. 
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? 

Here Arnold's philosophic self is speaking — we 
feel it to be so. It is Goethe's teaching — he who 
was so cold toward these aspirations after eternal 
personal life. "Empedocles on Etna" is in many 



The Mirror and the Cup S^ 

respects a puzzle. Classic in treatment, and 
containing several passages which are often quoted 
as typically Grecian, yet the general feeling 
throughout is modern. This is especially true 
of the hymn, where the topics taken up by the 
sage are such as appeal to our immediate interests. 
But it is certainly not a suitable preliminary argu- 
ment to an act of suicide, as dramatically it 
ought to be. The advice given by the lyrist 
would rather lead to wholly different conduct 
on the speaker's part — to the calm of resignation. 
Suicide, we feel, should naturally be dubbed by 
him rank cowardice, worthy of "one of the world's 
poor, routed leavings, who had failed under the 
heat of this life's death"; unworthy of the 
wise adviser who declares in the closing stanza: 

I say : Fear not ! Life still 

Leaves human effort scope. 
But, since life teems with ill, 
Nurse no extravagant hope ; 
Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then 
despair! 

In the opening stanzas we have emphasized 
the huge machinery of the world, and the helpless- 
ness of man to do more than appreciate the vast- 
ness. Man is portrayed as a mere pendant, 
who is permitted to peep at the spectacle of 
"eternal process moving on," but has nothing 
to dowith carrying out the arrangements. We 



-J 



I 

86 Matthew Arnold | 

remember Pascal's profound saying in regard j 
to the satisfaction afforded by prayer — that man . 
thereby gets strengthened by feeHng himself to \ 
be a cause of things: "Why has God given man | 
prayer, and bidden him use it ? — To leave him \ 
the dignity of causality. " I 

In the third stanza v^e find emphasized the | 
deficiency so present in Goethe's constitution, and • 
appearing in a less degree in Arnold's — the lack j 
of the element of complete personal trust. The 
elements do indeed baffle us, and play and sport ■ 
with us, but the Power which controls them is ; 
a loving personality, in sympathy with his crea- 
tures. The idea of a supernatural Power so j 
deficient in sympathy as to laugh at man's inabil- * 
ity to solve the puzzle of existence is pagan and 1 
early Hebrew, and may suit Arnold's philosophic \ 
portraiture; but it is both unchristian and » 
repulsive: 

The gods laugh in their sleeve 

To watch man doubt and fear, 
Who knows not what to believe 
Since he sees nothing clear, 
And dares stamp nothing false where he finds nothing sure. 

The next two stanzas are a Stoic protest against 
a philosophy of necessitarianism or determinism. | 
Empedocles asserts that, even if it be granted I 
that freedom of the will is dubious and difficult I 

"9. 

of proof, yet it is better to assume it as a basis 



The Mirror and the Cup 87 

of action. Otherwise man's personality is weak- 
ened and degraded: 

And can onr souls not strive, 
But with the winds must go, 
And hiury where they drive ? 
Is fate indeed so strong, man's strength indeed so poor? 

The speaker refuses to give a definite answer to 
the pllilosophic question; he will confine himself 
to conduct: 

I will not judge. That man, 

Howbeit, I judge as lost 
Whose mind allows a plan 

Which would degrade it most; 
And he treats doubt the best who tries to see least ill. 

Then follows a piece of Arnold's favorite teach- 
ing, which he preached in season and out of sea- 
son. The unfortunate thing about miracles, 
he insists, is that they do not happen; moreover, 
they distract men's minds from practical and ex- 
perimental religion. Arnold was very impatient 
with those who, while conceding on their own 
part, and demanding from others, a complete be- 
lief in all the miracles of the Bible, yet swiftly 
and uncompromisingly reject all other miracles 
whatsoever. He regarded it as an attitude diffi- 
cult of rational defense, and shutting out good 
orthodox Christians from wholesome sympathy 
with religious peoples of other communions. 
Why impose such arbitrary limits on miraculous 



88 Matthew Arnold 

agency, he continued, if it be indeed conceded 
as an historical reality ? In some respects these 
sixth and following stanzas of the hymn may 
be regarded as of prime importance in the poem, 
as calling upon the modern Christian to put him- 
self in the place of a good Greek who had no 
use for thaumaturgy and Oriental marvels: 

Ask not the latest news of the last miracle, 
Ask not what days and nights 

In trance Pantheia lay, 
But ask how thou such sights 
May'st see without dismay; 
Ask what most helps when known, thou son of Anchitus! 

This teaching was later expanded into a novel 
by the poet's niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose 
"Robert Elsmere" was a nine days' wonder, and 
enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, some fifteen 
years ago. Its burden is, " Miracles do not 
happen." 

To-day a cautious and well-informed science 
makes no such peremptory statements regarding 
miracles. A recent commentator on Arnold — 
Mr. W. H. Dawson — quotes from the scientific 
veteran, Alfred Russell Wallace, writing so recently 
as March, 1903, in that very critical journal, 
The Fortnightly Review: ** Although these 
[recent] discoveries have, of course, no bearing 
upon the special theological dogmas of the Chris- 



The Mirror and the Cup 89 

tian or of any other religion, they do tend to show 
that our position in the material universe is special 
and probably unique, and that it is such as to 
lend support to the view, held by many great 
thinkers and writers of to-day, that the supreme 
end and purpose of this vast universe was the 
production and development of the living soul 
in the perishable body of man." Mr. Dawson 
also quotes from the Cambridge poet and philoso- 
pher, F. W. H. Myers, Henry Sidgwick's friend, 
who died recently: "In consequence of the new 
evidence all reasonable men a century hence 
will believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas, 
in default of the new evidence, no reasonable men 
a century hence would have believed it. " Arnold's 
"Nature" and "principles of verification," indeed, 
belong to a bygone era, and in these matters we 
can leave him in company with his Greek mouth- 
piece. 

At stanza eleven we have the "double self" 
described, that striking development of our mod- 
ern civilization: 

And we feel, day and night, 

The burden of ourselves — 
Well, then, the wiser wight 

In his own bosom delves. 
And asks what ails him so, and gets what cure he can. 

Keen and poignant as have been the agonies 
of this self-examination, yet the result has been 



QO Matthew Arnold 

much earnest moral work. The recommenda- 
tion comes in the following stanza: 

The sophist sneers, "Fool, take 

Thy pleasure, right or wrong." 
The pious wail, "Forsake 

A world these sophists throng." 
Be neither saint- nor sophist-led, but be a man! 

In stanza thirteen we have Emerson's teaching 
that the truth preached by all the sects is but 
the same as that possessed by every man: 

These hundred doctors try- 
To preach thee to their school. 

"We have the truth!" they cry; 
And yet their oracle, 
Trumpet it as they will, is but the same as thine. 

And it is followed in stanza fourteen by a 
metrical exposition of Goethe's favorite theme — 
"the harmony of a universally experienced 
nature": 



Once read thy own breast right 

And thou hast done with fears ; 
Man gets no other light. 

Search he a thousand years. 
Sink in thyself! there ask what ails thee, at that shrine! 

Three stanzas further on the singer touches 
upon the striking fallacy of the present era, the 
identification of pain with evil — a fallacy which 
springs out of that vaguest of phrases, yet one 
most potent in political influence, the "rights of 



The Mirror and the Cup 91 

man." Here it takes the form of the inherent 
right of a man to enjoy happiness in this life : 

Could'st thou, Pausanias, learn 

How deep a faiilt is this ; 
Could'st thou but once discern 

Thou hast no right to bliss ; 
No title from the gods to welfare and repose. 

Man is apt to forget that he is not completely 
his own, self-determined and self-regulated: 

To tunes we did not call, our being must keep chime. 

If a man would obtain even moderate bliss, and 
he is justified in seeking it, he must discipline 
himself painfully: 

We would have health, and yet 
Still use our bodies ill ; 
Bafflers of our own prayers, from youth to life's last 
scene. 

We would have inAvard peace. 

We will not look within ; 
We would have misery cease, 

Yet will not cease from sin ; 
We want all pleasant ends, but will use no harsh means. 

And good people grow peevish when troubles 
come upon them, as if the powers above specially 
shielded the pious from harm; but 

Streams will not curb their pride 
The just man not to entomb, 
Nor lightnings go aside 

To give his virtues room; 
Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man's 
barge. 



92 Matthew Arnold 

At stanza fifty-five the poet bluntly refuses 
to accept the argument that the existence of wishes 
and concepts proves the reality of these concepts 
— the Cartesian method of proving the existence 
of God; of that perfection which we, who are 
finite and limited, can conceive clearly and dis- 
tinctly, but cannot comprehend or attain to: 

Fools! That in man's brief term 

He cannot all things view, 
Affords no ground to affirm 
That there are gods who do ; 
Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest. 

Here Arnold's limited and arbitrary conception 
of Nature stands in the way of a just appreciation 
of verification through the needs and claims of 
personality. In the words of his doubting friend, 
Arthur Hugh Clough: 

And yet, when all is thought and said, 
The heart still overrules the head; 
Still what we hope we must believe. 
And what is given us receive; 

Must still believe, for still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope 
What here is faithfully begun 
Will be completed, not -undone. 

In stanzas sixty and sixty-one the miserable 
delusion is ridiculed of passing the best part of 
our lives in the pursuit of selfish pleasures and 
then, when appetite fails and pleasures pall, of 



The Mirror and the Cup 93 

offering the dregs of ourselves as a libation to the 
gods — the fallacy of "young sinner, old saint '\- 

We pause ; we hush our heart, 

And thus address the gods: 
"The world hath failed to impart 

The joy our youth forebodes, 
Failed to fill up the void whiclj in oiir breasts we bear. 

"Changeftd till now, we still 

Looked on to something new; 
Let us, with changeless will, 

Henceforth look on to you. 
To find with you the joy we in vain here require!" 
Fools! . . . 

In two of the stanzas immediately succeeding 
we seem to hear Arnold enunciate his own cheer- 
ful, amiable, man-of-the-world creed: 

And yet, for those who know 

Themselves, who wisely take 
Their way through life, and bow 

To what they cannot break. 
Why should I say that life need yield but moderate bliss? 

• • • • • ••• 

Is it so small a thing 

To have enjoyed the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring. 

To have loved, to have thought, to have done; 
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling 
foes? 

In stanza sixty-six, which follows, there is a 
Goethe-like warning against cherishing roseate 
hopes of future bliss in a remote heaven, by which 
we are apt to 

Lose all our pleasant state. 
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose. 



94 Matthew Arnold 

Then follows a short idyllic picture of the village 
churl, as a person to be envied in his simple 
happiness. The closing stanza, the seventieth, 
gives all the comfort that can be given by a dis- 
appointed man to those asking for advice: 

Nurse no extravagant hope ; 
Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then 
despair! 

"Empedocles on Etna" was one of Arnold's 
earlier poems, published anonymously under the 
name "A"; and, although it gave the title to 
the volume, he omitted it in the first collection 
of his poems under his own name. His reasons 
were based on dissatisfaction with its lack of 
dramatic movement. Browning, however, highly 
esteemed the piece, and induced him to insert it 
in a later issue of poems. The author expressly 
disclaims, in his Letters, an intention to identify 
himself with the beliefs and opinions enunciated 
in such creations as "Empedocles" and "Ober- 
mann," where he speaks through a mask: ^*The 
Contemporary Review, the Christian World, and 
other similar periodicals fix on the speeches of 
Empedocles and Obermann, and calmly say, 
dropping all mention of the real speakers, *Mr. 
Arnold here professes his Pantheism,' or, 'Mr. 
Arnold here disowns Christianity.' However, 
the religious world is in so unsettled a state that 



The Mirror and the Cup 95 

this sort of thing does not do the harm it would 
have done two years ago." The pity is, they 
contain far less that is painful to orthodoxy than 
the theological utterances to be found in his prose 
treatises; while as an intellectual cold water 
"shower bath" they are distinctly more stimu- 
latino;. 

The poem, however, which must be regarded as 
a direct negative to the serene, expansive optimism 
of Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is Arnold's 
"Growing Old," where the poet surely succeeds 
in giving an ordinary reader a fit of "the shivers": 

What is it to grow old ? 

Is it to lose the glory of the form, 

The luster of the eye? 

Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath? 

— Yes, but not^this alone. 

Is it to feel our strength — 

Not our bloom only, but our strength — decay? 

Is it to feel each limb 

Grow stiff er, every function less exact. 

Each nerve more loosely strung? 

• • • • • • • 

It is to spend long days 

And not once feel that we were ever young; 

It is to add, immured 

In the hot prison of the present, month 

To month with weary pain. 

« • • • • • • 

It is — last stage of all — 

When we are frozen up within, and quite 

The phantom of ourselves. 

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost, 

Which blamed the living man. 



g6 Matthew Arnold 

This is in truth the poetry of disillusion car- 
ried to its limits; and a very excellent tonic to the 
enthusiastic glow of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," if a tonic 
be needed. Dramatically, it would agree better 
with the mood of Empedocles, who, when his 
song was ended, plunged into the crater; thus 
shattering his outworn and dingy mirror — the 
"gusty toy." 



CHAPTER V 

ARNOLD'S SYMPATHY WITH THE BRUTE 

CREATION 

The relation of animals to man is treated 
very sweetly and sympathetically in the poems 
of Matthew Arnold; and one fault I have to find 
in the otherwise excellent pocket edition of 
his works published in the Golden Treasury 
series is that it fails to give a corner to these 
animal poems. The Christian world in the past 
few centuries has grown much more tender to 
dumb creatures, and is beginning to recognize 
duties and responsibilities undreamed of before. 
Dumb creatures can teach us many deep lessons 
in life. We find this genial social current at its 
strongest and best in Arnold. 

There is but little in the Scriptures to draw us 
close to animals, with the single exception of the 
lamb. And even the loving scriptural use of the 
lamb, in analogy, is largely due to the fact that 
it was used sacrificially. All throughout the life 
of the chosen people, indeed, the sheep was cher- 
ished and valued, for it represented to them not 
only helplessness, but also meekness, patience, 
and submission. It is a mistake, however, to 
suppose that the goat or kid was despised as com- 
7 97 



98 Matthew Arnold 

pared with the sheep or lamb. In Prov. 30. 31, 
the he-goat is referred to as one who is stately 
in march, for he was in the habit of leading the 
combined flock; and so he became typical of the 
princes of the people: "There be three things 
which go well, yea, four are comely in going: a 
lion which is strongest among beasts, and turneth 
not away for any; a greyhound; an he-goat also; 
and a king, against whom there is no rising up." 
And so in Zechariah: **Mine anger was kindled 
against the shepherds, and I punished the goats;" 
that is, the leaders. And Isaiah speaks of the 
he-goats of the earth, the kings of the nations, 
rising up from their thrones. 

We must be on our guard, then, against miscon- 
ceiving the language of our Lord in Matt. 25. 32, 
where he speaks of the blessed being separated 
from the accursed as the sheep are separated 
from the goats (or rather kids): "And before 
him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall 
separate them one from another, as a shepherd 
divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall 
set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on 
the left." This passage ought not to be inter- 
preted too absolutely. We know that a meta- 
phor does not go on all fours, and here the analogy 
should be limited to the act of separation — famil- 
iar to those living in a pastoral country like Pales- 



Sympathy with Brute Creation 99 

tine, where goats and sheep herd together; but 
even while awaiting the fiUing of the trough 
they instinctively range themselves apart. Our 
Lord's language does not imply that the kids are 
either less valuable or less mild and tractable than 
the lambs. And yet, with that tendency to 
antijthesis which at certain periods of history has 
been excessive, the goat has been degraded, and 
his name despised, as if he were a type of the 
sinner. Did Matthew Arnold in his beautiful son- 
net "The Good Shepherd with the Kid" read 
later views into the symbolism ? Was the kid 
meant really to represent the child of a sinner ? 
Possibly the symbolism of early Christianity 
had already come to this antithesis by the time 
of Tertullian, at the close of the second century. 

THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID 

He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save! 
So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side 
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried, 

"Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, 
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave. " 
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed, 
The infant Church! of love she felt the tide 

Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. 

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, 
With eye suffused but heart inspired true, 

On those walls subterranean, where she hid 

Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, 

She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew — 

And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. 

« nrr 



100 Matthew Arnold 

To turn to other animals mentioned in the 
Scriptures. The Oriental dog to this day is 
pretty much of a cur. If we enter Asia from the 
West, we find Mohammedan intolerance express- 
ing itself in terms of this useful animal. "Dog of 
a Christian!" is the Moslem's favorite epithet. 
And the dog in Mohammedan towns and cities 
is a scavenger, unmannerly and unclean. If we 
approach Asia from the East, matters are still not 
satisfactory. The Japanese dog is an ungainly, 
half-wolfish animal, and the other breeds which 
have been introduced are allowed to mul- 
tiply to an unseemly degree; for the Buddhist 
dislike of the shedding of blood prevents a proper 
supervision and weeding out of the worthless 
and unnecessary. In the Old Testament the 
type of dog most frequently referred to — and 
there are only about thirty cases of such refer- 
ence — is the unclean pariah dog. The phrase 
"dead dog'' should indeed be translated "pa- 
riah dog." 

In the New Testament a new note is struck in 
Matt. 15. 27, where the Syrophoenician woman 
pleads for kinder treatment; "It is not meet," 
remarked our Lord, "to take the children's bread, 
and cast it to dogs." And she said, "Truth, Lord: 
yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their 
masters' table." Here we seem to touch Roman 



Sympathy with Brute Creation ioi 

life and habits, and a friendlier relationship with 
the canine tribe — the beginnings of the modern 
attitude. 

With the teaching of Augustine came an 
unfriendly attitude toward all kinds of animals, 
however harmless. The w^ay to heaven was sup- 
posed to be in the path of sense-subjection, with 
the animal in mankind trampled under foot. 
Saint Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the School- 
men, while allowing a soul to animals, declared 
that the sensitive soul in the lower animals is 
corruptible; while in man, since it is the same in 
substance as the rational soul, it is incorruptible. 
The kindly attitude toward the dumb creation 
of the saintly Francis d'Assisi is one of the bright 
spots in the social history of the Dark Ages. On 
one occasion, as he was on a preaching tour, the 
birds flocked around him as if to bid him 
welcome. "Brother birds," was his salutation, 
"you ought to praise and love your Creator very 
much. He has given you feathers for clothing, 
wings for flying, and all that is needful for you. He 
has made you the noblest of all his creatures; he 
permits you to live in the pure air; you have 
neither to sow nor to reap, and yet he takes care 
of you." Whereat the birds arched their necks, 
spread out their wings, opened their beaks, as if to 
thank him, while he went up and down among 



102 Matthew Arnold 

them and stroked them with the border of his 
tunic, at length sending them away with his bless- 
ing. On another occasion, as he preached in the 
open air, the swallows chirped so loudly as to 
drown his voice. " 'Tis my turn to speak, sister 
swallows," he expostulated; "be quiet, and wait 
till I have finished." 

This friendly tone is absent from the pages of 
"The Imitation of Christ," with all its beauty; for 
example, "If thy heart were right with God, all 
creatures would be for thee a mirror of life, and a 
volume of holy doctrines." This is sermonizing, 
not the language of the heart. Saint Francis was 
a living example of Coleridge's teaching: 

He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small. 

Coleridge does not mean that kindness is an 
equivalent for prayer, but that the prayerful 
spirit is essentially the loving spirit. Pharisaic piety 
is not really prayerful. Arnold held Saint Francis 
in the highest honor, as a figure of magical power 
and charm, esteeming his century, the thirteenth, 
as "the most interesting in the history of Chris- 
tianity after its primitive age, more interesting 
than even the century of the Reformation"; and 
the interest, he adds, centers chiefly in Saint 
Francis. He it was who brought religion home 



Sympathy with Brute Creation 103 

to the hearts of the people, and "founded the 
most popular body of ministers of religion that 
has ever existed in the church." 

Saint Francis, finding prose too tame a me- 
dium for the outpouring of his spirit, threw his 
meditations into poetry, and has left us a "Can- 
ticle of the Creatures," which Arnold translates 
for us in his essay entitled " Pagan and Mediae- 
val Religious Sentiment." Artless in language 
and irregular in rhythm, this canticle was intended 
for popular use: 

O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong 
praise, glory, honor, and all blessing! 

Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and 
especially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and 
who brings us the light; fair is he, and shining with a very 
great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! 

Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the 
stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven. 

Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air 
and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou 
upholdest in life all creatures. 

Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serv- 
iceable unto us, and humble and precious and clean. 

Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom 
thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright, and 
pleasant, and very mighty, and strong. 

Praised be my Lord for our mother the Earth, the which 
doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, 
and flowers of many colors, and grass. 

Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another 
for his love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; 
blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for thou, O 
most highest, shalt give them a crown! 



104 Matthew Arnold 

Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, 
from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in 
mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy 
most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do 
them harm. 

Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto 
him, and serve him with great humility. 

Comparing this hymn with another hymn he 
had rendered from the Greek of the Sicilian 
Theocritus, Arnold remarks how the first admits 
just as much of the world as is pleasure-giving; 
while the second "admits the whole world, rough 
and smooth, painful and pleasure-loving, all 
alike but all transfigured by the power of a 
spiritual emotion, all brought under a law of 
supersensual love, having its seat in the soul. 
It can thus even say, Traised be my Lord for our 
stster the death of the body.^ 

How unconventional was Saint Francis! The 
prudish monks of his time would not allow even 
the females of animals to enter the precincts of 
their monasteries; but one day when at Siena he 
asked for some turtledoves, and thus addressed 
them: "Little sister turtledoves, you are simple, 
innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves 
be caught ? I shall save you from death, and 
have nests made for you, so that you may bring 
forth young, and multiply according to the 
commandment of our Creator. " Again when, at 



Sympathy with Brute Creation 105 

Greccio, they brought him a young hare which 
had been caught in a trap, " Come to me, brother 
leveret," he said; and when the poor thing, being 
set free, approached him, he took it up, caressed 
it, and then laid it down that it might run off; 
but it returned to him agkin and again, so that he 
had to take it himself to the woods. 

We notice at this period a general growing 
attachment to dogs. A proverb comes to us from 
the time of Saint Bernard, "Qz^z me amat, amet 
et canem meum,^^ which old Heywood, before 
Shakespeare's time, translated, "Love me, love 
my dog." 

The kinship had grown close by the sixteenth 
century. The story is told of Luther that when 
his dog Hans was angrily growling he soothed 
him with the words, "Don't growl, little Hans; 
you too will go to heaven and have a little golden 
tail to wag." We see, therefore, that dogs had 
now names and individuality; a fact which comes 
out in Shakespeare's "Lear" pathetically: 

The little dogs and all, 
Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me. 

So complains the afflicted king. 

A century later Newton and his dog Diamond 
come on the scene. The household pet had 
chanced to overturn a candle on his master's 
table, whereby some important papers were re- 



io6 Matthew Arnold 

duced to ashes. "Ah! Diamond, Diamond, thou 
little knowest the damage thou hast done," was all 
the amiable sage could say in reproof. 

Descartes had carried his dualism of mind and 
matter to such an extreme that, in the face of 
common sense, he denied real feelings to animals, 
and declared they were mere automata. Leibnitz, 
who was four years old when Descartes died, and 
the contemporary of Newton, refused to accept 
such a doctrine; but while he claimed for animals 
the immaterial principle of sensitive life, which 
has a continuity apart from matter, yet he held 
that we must not confound with other forms, 
or souls, minds or rational souls which are of a 
higher rank, and resemble little gods, made in the 
image of God, and having within them some ray 
of the divine enlightenment. For this reason 
God governs minds as a father looks after his 
children; while, on the other hand, he deals with 
other substances as an engineer works with his 
machine. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, both 
in Protestant and Catholic countries, animals 
were but little esteemed. The doctrine of innate 
human depravity leaves but meager possibilities 
for poor brutes. A high sacramentarian of the 
time of Queen Anne actually taught that infants 
are mortal like the brutes until they are baptized ! 



Sympathy with Brute Creation 107 

The great metaphysician Samuel Clarke, of 
Norwich, to whom Bishop Butler owed so much, 
taking a higher view of human nature than this 
ultra-Augustinian, much preferred to allow the 
possibility of immortality to the brute creation 
rather than to deny to man an immortal soul at 
birth. Joseph Butler was of the same mind, 
greatly to the surprise and disgust of many good 
people; and John Wesley, with a largeness of 
mind that does not surprise close readers of his 
Journal, did not disagree with the good bishop. 
The time had gone by when a philosopher might 
assert that he could not have discovered that 
infants possessed souls, but for the later develop- 
ment they showed as adults. This fallacy was 
largely due to the old overemphasis of the 
intellectual in man, of the purely discursive 
reason. 

It is in the poems and letters of Cowper, Gray, 
and Burns that we first find animal friendships 
made the theme of serious treatment. Burns 
rises to his highest when he takes to his heart a 
poor sheep like Mailie, or a dog like Luath, or a 
nameless field mouse. Why, asks he, of the wee 
mousie, whose little biggin he had unwittingly 
demolished, why should you startle 

At me, thy poor earthbom companion 
And fellow mortal? 



io8 Matthew Arnold 

And so dear was Mailie to his heart that we 
feel that the Elegy, with its mock-heroics, would 
never have been written had the poor sheep 
really been cruelly killed before her time. The 
fact is, Mailie was rescued in time by her kind 
master and friend. 

In the century which intervened between the 
writing of Burns's "To a Field Mouse'* and Mat- 
thew Arnold's "Geist's Grave" there is nothing 
similar in literature of equal pathos, at least in 
poetry. Perhaps Dr. Brown's immortal "Rab 
and His Friends" should not be forgotten. The 
tributes to canine fidelity in Scott and Words- 
worth are not in the same category. Sir Wal- 
ter's attachment to Maida was part of his life, 
and he brings this close relationship between man 
and beast into his "Guy Mannering," in his 
sympathetic treatment of Dandie Dinmont and 
the four eager terriers. But the treatment re- 
mains objective, and does not enter into the 
psychology of the relationship. 

The pretty little dachshund Geist, one of 
four canine pets who brought brightness into 
the Arnold household, lived but four years with 
them: 

That loving heart, that patient soul, 

Had they indeed no longer span, 
To run their course, and reach their goal, 

And read their homily to man? 



Sympathy with Brute Creation 109 

That liquid, melancholy eye, 

From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs 

Seemed surging the Virgilian cry. 
The sense of tears in mortal things. 

Here the poet appears naturally to revert to the 
classical concept, the eleos, which enters into 
Virgil's pathetic ^^ Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem 
morlalta fangunt/' 

But while Butler, in searching for stable grounds 
whereon to place the doctrine of immortality, 
finds it impossible to rule out summarily the brute 
creation, " which groaneth and travaileth in 
pain together until now, waiting for the manifes- 
tation of the sons of God," Arnold resignedly 
accepts a common lot of annihilation with them : 

That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled 

By spirits gloriotisly gay. 
And temper of heroic mold — 

What, was four years their whole short day? 

Yes, only four! — and not the course 

Of all the centuries yet to come, 
And not the infinite resource 

Of Nature, with her countless sum 

Of figures, with her fullness vast 

Of new creation evermore, 
Can ever quite repeat the past, 

Or just thy little self restore. 

Stern law of every mortal lot! 

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, 
And builds himself I know not what 

Of second life I know not where. 



no Matthew Arnold 

But thou, when struck thine hour to go, 

On us, who stood despondent by, 
A meek last glance of love didst throw, 

And humbly lay thee down to die. 

Surely it is a pity to use our love for unselfish 
animal friends in order to point so despairing a 
moral. Nelly Arnold's pet canary, Matthias, 
has also received a memorial tribute from the 
poet: 

Poor Matthias! — Found him lying 
Fall'n beneath his perch and dying? 

— Songster thou of many a year, 
Now thy mistress brings thee here, 
Says it fits that I rehearse. 
Tribute due to thee, a verse. 
Meed for daily song of yore 
• Silent now for evermore. 

The poet remarks upon the greater aloofness 
of the feathered tribe from man. We can be 
joyful with the sportive antics of a dog or a cat, 
we can soothe these pets when they are troubled, 
stroke or pat them back into cheerfulness; but 

Birds, companions more unknown, 
Live beside us, but alone; 
Finding not, do all they can, 
Passage from their souls to man. 
Kindness we bestow, and praise. 
Laud their plumage, greet their lays; 
Still, beneath their feathered breast. 
Stirs a history unexpressed. 



Sympathy with Brute Creation hi 

The poet's farewell to Matthias is a farewell of 
resignation, in the mildly pathetic key that suits 
the situation: 

Fare thee well, companion dear! 
Fare for ever well; nor fear, 
Tiny though thou art, to stray- 
Down the uncompanioned way! 
We without thee, Httle friend, 
Many years have not to spend; 
What are left will hardly be 
Better than we spent with thee. 

Why was it that the publication of Matthew 
Arnold's Letters, a few years ago, proved so pro- 
found a disappointment ? They were eagerly 
waited for, in the absence of autobiographical 
or other matter. It is well known that he shrank 
almost morbidly from publicity, and left in- 
structions at his death that no biography should 
be published. His letters are bright and human; 
they tell us of his children and his pets; there was 
Atossa, the favorite cat: 

Cruel, but composed and bland, 
Dumb, inscrutable and grand. 
So Tiberius might have sat, 
Had Tiberius been a cat. 

He seems to have had a growing devotion to 
flowers. But there are no signs in the letters 
that he had sufficiently fathomed the depths 
of human nature, interested himself sufficiently 
in the social problems of the age, or learned 



112 Matthew Arnold i 

the meaning of humanity and nature in so thorough j 
a way as to justify his sweeping negations cov- | 
ering the universe and the future. He rises ' 
merely to a sufficient height to view the drama of j 
history, and exclaim in a passion of disappoint- \ 
ment, "O, the pity of it!" It seemed to Richard I 
Holt Hutton that Arnold felt a subtle delight in i 
the expression of that exquisite pathos of which I 
he was undoubtedly a master; there is an evident \ 
ultimate reaction in his moods from the cold \ 
pessimism into which he drifts. He swings back \ 
again into the warmer current of life and hope and j 
trust. It would be well for his readers to make l 
sure that this "moral shower-bath'* treatment is \ 
followed in their case also by the same reactive j 
glow. 



■:\ 



CHAPTER VI 

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND MODERN SCIENCE 

The question has often been asked, What 
exactly was Arnold's attitude toward modern 
science ? In his writings he professes to be keenly 
scientific, but his treatment of things and his 
general affiliations were always distinctly literary. 
We do not associate him with painful and accurate 
laboratory work; and his etymologies and general- 
izations in the field of philological science are 
neither founded on first-hand investigation nor 
are they rigidly accurate. Oxford, also, is usually 
credited with being almost mediseval in her phil- 
osophic and scientific outlook. We remember 
the pathetic exclamation of a puzzled Oxford don 
who resented the influx of German methods into 
the peaceful antiquity of the university on the Isis : 
**I wish," he moaned, "that Jarman philosophy 
and Jarman theology were all at the bottom of 
the Jarman Ocean!" 

And yet the fact remains that, whatever Ger- 
man institutes have since accomplished, Oxford 
was, a hundred years ago, the home and cradle 
of modern geology. The father of geology 
was William Smith, born in the county of Oxford. 

8 113 



114 Matthew Arnold 

In his practical duties as surveyor ana engineer 
of canals and irrigation works Smith gathered 
together valuable original material which he used 
for the publication of maps, and these maps are 
of great historic moment. His work was passed 
on to an Oxford scholar, William Buckland, later 
Dean of Westminster; a deanery, by the way, 
which ranks in importance higher than many 
English bishoprics. The dignity of science — real 
science — v^as thus installed in an honored place in 
the Anglican Church; one reason, certainly, why 
Matthew Arnold was so proud of his church. 
Buckland, making use of these maps, was able to 
follow out Smith's indications, and to trace back 
the history of the world's mutations. His work 
was familiar to Thomas Arnold. Three years 
before the latter came up as a freshman to Corpus 
Christi College in Oxford, Buckland had been 
appointed a fellow of the college, and in 1813 he 
became University Professor of Geology. His 
influence was great in thinking circles. He did 
much to infuse a new scientific spirit into the uni- 
versity, and at the same time to quiet the pertur- 
bations of the timidly orthodox, who were afraid 
of the effect of these scientific revelations on the 
traditional Mosaic cosmogony, which they associ- 
ated with absolute religious truth. Dr. William 
Buckland was a consistent Christian, as well as a 



Modern Science 115 

leader in science, and was not afraid of proclaim- 
ino[ truths which revealed God's manner of work- 
ing in his own universe. His methods fascinated 
Thomas Arnold, who, as we learn from Justice 
Coleridge, became one of his most earnest and 
intelligent pupils, and was afterward known for 
the skill and ease with which he made use of 
geological facts in enforcing moral truths. 

The friendship between Buckland and the 
Arnolds continued throup;hout their lives. The 
geologist served as a village pastor in Hampshire, 
and then as a canon of Christ Church, before 
he was appointed Dean of Westminster ; and 
marriage ties strengthened the friendship between 
the two families. 

The friend and pupil of Buckland could not 
write a poem like *'Empedocles on Etna" as 
if he were a pure ancient Greek. It was morally 
impossible. The modern attitude toward the 
created world of to-day, as a phase in a long his- 
tory of progress, is notable in the writings of both 
Thomas and Matthew. Like the great Scotch- 
man Thomas Chalmers, Buckland was appointed 
lecturer by the Bridgewater trustees, and in 
1836 appeared his treatise, which aimed to prove, 
by the aids of science, "The Power, Wisdom, and 
Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation.'' 
When Baron Bunsen visited England two years 



ii6 Matthew Arnold 

later he found Buckland "persecuted by bigots 
for having asserted that among the fossils there 
might be a preadamic species." 

Readers of "In Memoriam" know how the 
notion of a universe which had existed and pro- 
duced grass, and vegetables, and creatures, for 
countless ages before the advent of man, domi- 
nated the thought of the poet Tennyson; and how 
the expression of the thought puzzled many good 
people who conceived it irreligious to think of a 
world much over four thousand years old. Very 
early in Matthew Arnold's life, history thus came 
in a mystic preadamic form; and the conversa- 
tions to which he listened at his father's table, 
entered into by clergymen and dignitaries of the 
church, accustomed him to conceive of a process 
in creation working away back in the dim begin- 
nings of time. This conception is present in his 
poem "The Future": 

Who can see the green earth any more 

As she was by the sources of Time ? 

Who imagines her fields as they lay 

In the sunshine, unworn by the plow? 

Who thinks as they thought, 

The tribes who then roamed on her breast, 

Her vigorous, primitive sons? 

For geology, however, Matthew Arnold had 
no special liking; the natural science which 
attracted him most was botany. His passionate 



Modern Science 117 

love of flowers appears in his letters, but is by 
no means so evident in his poems; not so evident, 
for instance, as in the poems of Tennyson, who was 
always at home in the garden, among scented 
lanes, and in the flower-strewn meadows. Per- 
haps the most striking flower passage in Arnold 
occjars in his "Thyrsis," when he addresses the 
cuckoo: 

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? 
Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, 

Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 

Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell, 
And stocks in fragrant blow; 
Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 

And open, jasmine-muffled lattices. 

And groups under the dreaming garden-trees , 
And the full moon, and the white evening star. 

It was one of the poet's great objects in life to 
teach youth to delight in the beauties of God's 
earth as the Master delighted in them; he who 
bade his disciples gaze upon the lilies of the field, 
which neither toil nor spin, but whose glory 
surpasses the raiment of princes. There was a 
morbid teaching abroad which associated holiness 
with an indiff'erence to the beauties of earth. A 
good Mr. Cecil is quoted as having so expressed 
himself: " I want to see no more sea, hills, valleys, 
fields, abbeys, or castles. I feel vanity pervading 
everything but eternity and its concerns, and per- 



ii8 Matthew Arnold 

ceive these things to be suited to children." 
Arnold was right in declaring that the Bible, 
which he knew so well and quoted so often, teaches 
no such ascetic attitude. 

Some of his letters are delightfully full of flower 
lore, revealing what accurate botanical knowl- 
edge lay beneath his descriptions of nature in his 
poems. Take, for instance, the closing passage of 
a letter to his friend Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, 
written from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just 
two years before his death: "The flowers and 
trees are delightfully interesting. On a woody 
knoll behind this cottage the undergrowth is 
kalmia, which was all in flower when we came. 
The Monotropa untflora (Indian pipe or corpse 
plant, as they call it here — excellent names) is 
under every tree, the Pyrola rotundifolia in masses. 
Then we drive out through boggy ground, and 
towering up everywhere are the great meadow 
rue, beautifully elegant, the Helianthus giganteus 
and the milkweed — this last {Asclepias) in several 
varieties, and very effective. I believe it is an 
American plant only, and so I think is the shrubby 
cinquefoil, which covers waste ground, as the whin 
does with us. . . . The trees, too, delight 
me. I had no notion what maples really were, 
thinking only of our pretty hedgerow shrub at 
home; but they are, as, of course, you know, trees 



Modern Science 119 

of the family of our sycamore, but more imposing 
than our sycamore and more delicate. " 

And again, in one of his letters to his mother, 
he reveals this same passion — there are many such 
passages : '* I find it very, very useful and inter- 
esting to know the signification of names, and had 
written to ask him (Professor Deutsch) whether 
Jerusalem meant the Vision of peace' or *the 
foundation of peace'; either meaning is beautiful, 
but I wished for the first, as the more beautiful. 
However, you will see what he says. I should have 
written to you yesterday, but was taken out for 
a walk by the little girls. Our white violets have 
prospered. .• . . I know of but one clump of 
blue violets near Harrow, and that is kept well 
picked by village children. However, we found 
one or two in it, to the little girls' great delight. " 

His "Bacchanalia; or. The New Age" begins 
with a nature touch of this kind: 

The business of the day is done, 
The last-left haymaker is gone. 
And from the thyme upon the height, 
And from the elder-blossom white 
And pale dog-roses in the hedge, 
And from the mint-plant in the sedge, 
In puffs of balm the night air blows 
The perfume which the day forgoes. 

Suddenly the scene appears to be filled with a 
procession of Maenads and Bacchantes, and ancient 



120 Matthew Arnold 






Greece and her magic world are before the poet. 
But all is a passing illusion, the figures vanish 
and the voices are still: 



Ah, so the quiet was! 
So was the hush! 

Then comes the New Age, with all its violence 
and vigor: 

Thundering and bursting 

In torrents, in waves — 
Caroling and shouting 

Over tombs, amid graves — 
See! on the cumbered plain 

Clearing a stage, 
Scattering the past about, 

Comes the new age. 
Bards make new poems, 

Thinkers new schools, 
^ Statesmen new systems, 

Critics new rules. 
All things begin again; 

Life is their prize ; 
Earth with their deeds they fill, 

Fill with their cries. 

The singer calls upon the ideal poet to rise to 
the opportunities spread before him, to mirror 
forever the life that he sees and feels. Why is 
he mute ? 

Look, ah, what genius, 

Art, science, wit! 
Soldiers like Caesar, 

Statesmen like Pitt! 
Sculptors like Phidias, 

Raphaels in shoals, 



Modern Science 121 

Poets like Shakespeare — 

Beautiful souls! 
See on their glowing cheeks 

Heavenly the flush! 

Then again comes the chill disillusion: 

Ah, so the silence was! 
So was the hush! 

It js noticeable that Arnold in these lines makes 
no reference whatever to the triumphs of science, 
nor mentions any great name in the scientific 
world. After all, to him the most imposing 
achievements of man, since the time of Newton 
and Priestley — man's harnessing of the winds and 
the waves — meant little more than Nuremberg 
toys. He sought to dwell in the realm of the 
Eternal. 

But Arnold's realm of the Eternal rests on a 
misconception of what the Eternal really is. The 
Eternal is not that which a critic, sitting in judg- 
ment upon, can term finally exquisite and satisfy- 
ing to the aesthetic sense. There is as much of the 
Eternal in a great, moving steamship — although 
its mechanism and machinery may be antiquated 
five years hence — as in Saint Peter's at Rome or in 
a masterpiece of Raphael. The man who hves 
the Christ life to-day in some repulsive slum of a 
great, unlovely city may be closer to the Eternal 
than Homer, whose poetry has charmed twenty-five 
centuries of mankind. All human beings who 



122 Matthew Arnold 

fulfill the destiny which God has allotted to them 
are ambassadors of the Eternal; not the mere 
fortunate few who, happening to possess a literary 
or artistic gift, have produced masterpieces before 
which criticism is disarmed. Christ came not to 
judge the world, or as a supreme artist, but to 
give the world more of the divine energy and life. 
Whether this energy realizes itself in the evanes- 
cent products of to-day, or the (comparatively) ,' 
more enduring literary and artistic masterpieces j 
of Greece, Italy, and England, the Eternal Glory, ' 
the enduring Power of Love, is behind both, and , 
informing both; the products themselves are on a I 
secondary plane. The master worker in science i 
and in law is worthy of our respect equally with 
Homer and Raphael as an instrument of the 
Eternal. Part of his strength lies in the belief that 
he is getting nearer the mind of the great Being 
who is working out his purposes in this universe; 
and that man's relation to the universe is not a 
constant, but a ratio which is constantly growing 
in favor of man. If so, the great discoverers in 
science, and the noble army of efficient workers j 
in every field of human activity, deserve a place I 
with the poets, sculptors, and painters as revealers . 
of the Divine and Eternal. 






. 



CHAPTER VII 

A NINETEENTH CENTURY SADDUCEE 

From the beginning of his career to its close 
Arnold was a close and devout reader of the Scrip- 
ture&> not only of the canonical books of the Old 
and New Testaments, but also of the Apocrypha, 
several of the books in which have been recom- 
mended to the devout for their reading by the 
authorities of the Anglican Church. One of these 
is the Wisdom book of the Son of Sirach, com- 
monly known as Ecclesiasticus, a noble utterance; 
and its pages were familiar to Arnold. It was 
down among the list of books he took with 
him on his American tour to be read, and one of 
those marked out as having been read. In the 
very closing days of his life he must have been 
turning up its pages, for an excerpt from the thirty- 
eighth chapter appears in his notebook: "When 
the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and 
be comforted for him, when his spirit departeth 
from him." 

The term '^Pharisee" has been abundantly used 
in modern discussions to give edge to sarcasm, 
and the party that Arnold constantly antagonized 
within and without the church have had this 

123 



124 Matthew Ar.nold 

epithet constantly flung at them. The associated 
name "Sadducee/* however, has not been so 
popular. And yet, if the term "Pharisee" suits 
well a rigid Evangelical, that of "Sadducee" 
comes remarkably near fitting Arnold's peculiar 
position in religious matters. 

A conservative excessively reverent toward the 
past, an aristocrat by birth and temperament, 
one who looked coldly on all religious innovations 
and enthusiasm, the typical Sadducee had little 
influence outside of Jerusalem. He was strong 
in denials. He denied the resurrection of the 
dead, and refused to accept the plea that there 
must be retribution in a future state — a plea which 
appealed so strongly to the poor and needy Jews 
scattered abroad after the Exile. He denied the 
existence of angels and demons. He rejected 
fatalism, and, like the Stoic, regarded man as 
master of his own fate. A man must realize 
himself in this present world, and work out his 
own salvation here on earth; so declared the 
high-class Sadducee. 

Ecclesiasticus may be regarded as the first and 
greatest of Sadducee productions. It is the work 
of an author touched by the fascination of Greek 
culture, who yet reveres the law of his own people. 
As with Arnold, there is no dualism in Ecclesi- 
asticus. Sin is not something eternal realizing 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 125 

itself in the personality of Satan. "When the 
wicked man curses Satan he curses his own soul," 
says Ben Sirach. Compare this with Arnold's 
dictum, that sin is merely our own impotence or 
weakness; let a man be only true to himself 
and he can overcome sin by his own force and 
goodness. 

This slack-water period, as it may be termed, 
in Jewish history, when the canon of the Old 
Testament was complete and that of the New 
Testament was still in the future, had special 
attractions for modern thinkers like Arnold and 
Huxley. It was a time when the Greek Logos or 
Word, and the Greek Sophia or Wisdom, came 
into relations with the Hebrew law and right- 
eousness. A mysterious Other World, inhabited 
by God and angelic beings, and destined for the 
saints, had not yet laid hold upon the religious con- 
cepts of the people. The leading minds were satis- 
fied with the declaration of Micah (6. 8): "He 
hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what 
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
to love mercy, and to walk hum.bly with thy God ?" 

Some of the later prophets seemed to nineteenth 
century moralists to stand on a pinnacle of truth 
w^hich makes their great proclamations and 
exhortations better fitted for general use to-day 
than any other portions of the Scriptures. Dr. 



126 Matthew Arnold 

Thomas Arnold, in one of his letters, notes that 
the poet George Herbert, in one of his poems, 
uses language of this kind, as if he regarded the 
revelations of the patriarchal church almost with 
envy, because they had closer communion with 
God than Christians have. "All which seems to 
me to arise out of a forgetfulness or misappre- 
hension of the privileges of Christians in their 
communion with the Holy Spirit. . . . The 
third relation of the Deity to man is rather the 
most perfect of all, as it is that in which God 
communes with men, not *as a man talketh with 
his friend,' but as a Spirit holding discourse in- 
visibly and incomprehensibly, but more effectually 
than by any outward address — with the spirits 
only of his creatures." The discipline of the 
Old Testament, says his son, may be summed 
up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee 
from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, 
as a discipline teaching us to die to it. 

Matthew Arnold preferred an attitude that 
was negative on the subject of the life after death 
and demanded no reliance on a mystic Third 
Person. So impressed was he with the educa- 
tional value and availability of the Old Testament 
prophetic teaching that he edited for school use 
the chapters in Isaiah dealing with the great 
destiny of the nation, and known as the Restora- 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 127 

tion-Prophecy. His little book contained the last 
twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, with ample notes 
and a long preface, and was entitled "The Great 
Prophecy of Israel's Restoration." The book, 
although now very scarce, never actually became 
a text-book. 

A new meaning had been read into these 
chapters by recent research, and Arnold was 
anxious to popularize this interpretation. Instead 
of the term "Servant of the Lord" being made to 
apply immediately to Christ and his mission, it 
was understood as having a first reference to the 
times in which it was written. Suffering Israel 
was the servant upheld by the Eternal, the chosen 
one in whom his soul delighted; upon whom 
was poured his Spirit, who was destined to pro- 
claim his law of truth and righteousness to the 
nations. 

Availing himself of the labors of Ewald, 
Gesenius, Kuenen, and other learned biblical 
scholars, Arnold threw his convictions into book 
form in "Literature and Dogma," a brilliant 
attempt to rationalize the Scriptures. Many good 
Evangelicals had become reconciled to the theory 
that in the Old Testament we have a gift from 
God whose value lies not in its being in a literal 
sense a divine production, but as containing an 
invaluable record of divine dealings with a chosen 



128 Matthew Arnold 

people. Arnold was in the same camp with ortho- 
dox Christians in claiming for the Jewish people 
a special mission in history, a peculiar passion for 
righteousness, a unique genius for handling the 
deepest religious questions; in asserting that the 
man who does not know the Bible knows not the 
meaning of religion. Unbelievers openly scoff 
at this claim, and have as little use for Arnold's 
defense of Holy Writ as for Dr. Pusey's. 

How completely, in this rationalizing work, 
Arnold forgot the wise adage of the saintly old 
teacher — "Conserve the mystery" — is evident 
from the well-known passage dealing with the 
three Lord Shaftesburys. And yet he was 
intensely in earnest, and did not mean to scoff — 
far from it. Here is the passage: "As the Romish 
doctrine of the mass, the Real Presence, is a 
rude and blind criticism of *He that eateth me 
shall live by me,' so the Protestant tenet of justi- 
fication, 'pleading the blood of the Covenant,' is a 
rude and blind criticism of *The Son of Man came 
to give his life a ransom for many.' It is a taking 
of the words of Scripture literally and unintelli- 
gently. And our friends, the philosophical Lib- 
erals, are not slow to call this, too, a degrading 
superstition, just as Protestants call the doctrine 
of the mass a degrading superstition. We say, 
on the contrary, that a degrading superstition 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 129 

neither the one nor the other is. In imagining a 
sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord 
Shaftesbury, with a race of vile offenders to deal 
with, whom his natural goodness would incline 
him to let off, only his sense of justice will not allow 
it; then a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale 
of his father and very dear to him, who might 
lire in grandeur and splendor if he liked, but who 
prefers to leave his home to go and live among the 
race of offenders and to be put to an ignominious 
death, on condition that his merits shall be counted 
against their demerits, and that his father's good- 
ness shall be restrained no longer from taking 
effect, but any offender shall be admitted to the 
benefit of it on simply pleading the satisfaction 
made by the son; and then, finally, a third Lord 
Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who 
keeps very much in the background, and works 
in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously 
nevertheless, and who is busy in applying every- 
where the benefits of the son's satisfaction and 
the father's goodness — in an imagination, I say, 
such as this there is nothing degrading, and this 
is precisely the Protestant story of Justification. 
And how awe of the first Lord Shaftesbury, grati- 
tude and love toward the second, and earnest 
cooperation with the third, may fill and rule 
men's hearts so as to transform their conduct we 

9 



130 Matthew Arnold 

need not go about to show, for we have all seen it 
with our eyes. " 

This is the famous passage on the Trinity which 
Arnold saw fit later to regret, because of the offense 
it gave. There is a moral and intellectual serious- 
ness and earnestness underlying the whole of 
"Literature and Dogma" which makes the reader 
lament that one so ill equipped for theological 
discussion should have entered so airily into the 
theological arena. Of course, its publication 
meant a complete break, not only with Trini- 
tarians, but even with ordinary Unitarians. In its 
pages Arnold carries his dislike of anthropomor- 
phism so far as to deny personality to God, who 
becomes in its pages "the Eternal." 

Oddly enough, Arnold had never considered 
himself to be, nominally or sympathetically, in 
the Unitarian camp. From his father he had 
inherited a dislike to Unitarians, as "political Dis- 
senters," and he seems always to have fought shy 
of them in England. Toward American Uni- 
tarians he was more friendly, as was Dr. Thomas 
Arnold. "I heard some time since," writes the 
latter from Rugby in 1832, "that in the United 
States, where the Episcopal Church has expelled 
this creed (the Athanasian) the character of 
Unitarianism is very different from what it is in 
England, and is returning toward high Arianism, 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 131 

just as here it has gone a downward course to the 
very verge of utter disbelief." They could not 
have gone farther than his son. The present 
Minister of Education at Westminster, son of a 
Unitarian minister, recently defined the modi- 
cum of religion which he considered ought to be 
taught in the state schools. The majority of 
parents, he said, would undoubtedly like their 
children to be taught the simple elementary truths, 
the Fatherhood of God, the responsibilities of man, 
and the existence of a future state. Matthew 
Arnold's creed summarily disposes of the first 
and last as mere Aherglauhe, of the nature of 
superstition. 

Arnold early came under the spell of Emerson, 
and the teaching of the two men had much in 
common. He records his debt to the New Eng- 
lander in an early sonnet: 

written in Emerson's essays 

O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world, 

That thou canst hear, and hearing hold thy way ! 
A voice oracular hath pealed to-day; 

To-day a hero's banner is unfurled; 

Hast thou no lip for welcome? — So I said. 

Man after man, the world smiled and passed by; 

A smile of wistful incredulity. 
As though one spake of life unto the dead — 

Scornful, and strange, and sorrowful, and full 

Of bitter knowledge. Yet the will is free ; 
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; 



132 Matthew Arnold 

The seeds of godlike power are in us still ; 
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will! — 
Dumb judges, answer, truth or mockery? 

The two thinkers, in many respects so unlike, 
had yet essentially the same mission. Bathed and 
steeped in Christian thought, Emerson spent his 
life in reconciling it with Greek speculation and 
modern scientific results. Lowell was right when, 
in his "Fable for Critics," he calls him "half 
Greek": 

C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb, — 
E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; 
The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, 
Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek. 

Emerson's mission was to protest against the 
worldly or utilitarian spirit, and his aims were 
never negative. What he preached was eternal 
truth, revealed by the Almighty in the glory of the 
starry firmament, the splendor of the sunsets, 
the majesty of the mountains, the mystic beauty 
of ocean and river, and the still small voice in the 
heart of man. His words are often semi-Oriental 
in tone, which Arnold's never are. Man, he 
declared, by rights and often in reality, should be 
regarded as a divine incarnation, linking the 
eternal world with the phenomenal. This Ori- 
ental insistence upon personality as the last and 
greatest thing in the universe makes Emerson 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 133 

an optimist, while Arnold's doctrine that our per- 
sonalities must finally submit themselves to a 
Force is pessimistic. 

One crusade waged by Arnold w^ith zeal and 
insistence was surely but a hollow mockery. He 
never tired of proclaiming the need and advisability 
of a national church, with its noble and refined 
liturgy, its trained clergy, and its historic temples; 
"a great national society," as he termed it, for 
the promotion of what is commonly called good- 
ness, and for promoting it through the most effec- 
tual means possible, the only means which are 
really and truly effectual for the object — through 
the means of the Christian religion and of the Bible. 
In the essay from which I have just quoted he 
declares that the '^essence of religion is grace and 
peace." The more the sense of religion grows, 
he declares, and of religion in a large way — the 
sense of the beauty and rest of religion, the sense 
that its charm lies in grace and peace — the more 
will the present attitude, objections, and com- 
plaints of those who dislike an established church 
seem unworthy. 

But surely these words, charm, grace, peace, place 
Christianity upon an aesthetic basis rather than 
on its true foundation of saving power. The 
emphasis is entirely wrong; just as when a well- 
meaning person declares that only a Christian 



134 Matthew Arnold 

man can be a real gentleman. The term gentle- 
man is secondary and superficial, and is too small 
to include the deeper word Christian; so charm- 
ing, graceful, peaceful fail entirely to indicate the 
reality of Christ's teaching. The terms are com- 
patible with a mere religion of conformity, which 
is death, not life. "Unity and continuity in public 
religious worship are," he asserts, "a need of 
human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christen- 
dom; but unity and continuity in religious worship 
joined with perfect mental sanity and freedom. 
A Catholic church transformed is, I believe, the 
church of the future." 

Arnold's somewhat supercilious references to 
hymns reveal the weakness of his position. It was 
mainly through Christian hymns, popular ditties 
sung by the people, that Western Europe was 
civilized. These Latin hymns, with their forceful 
and measured lines, were a creation in the world's 
history; for the first time uniting, in one energizing 
expression, poetry, music, and moral conviction. 
The people sang them as nothing in the world's 
history had ever been sung before; for the singing 
signified new life to them. Again, at the Refor- 
mation, the soldiers of the new creed of individual 
faith, hope, and love, each with Bible in his pocket, 
read therein his "title to a mansion in the skies," 
and went forth to war singing, " Ein' feste Burg ist 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 135 

unserGott" — Luther's glorious battle hymn — or 
some other song of intense moral conviction. 
The "Jesus" hymns of the Moravians v^^ere an 
inspiration to the founder of Methodism; and his 
brother's "Jesus, Lover of my soul," meant 
far more to the century than all the poems of 
Pope, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith together. 
The Roman Catholic Church, clinging in a con- 
servative way to ancient habits, failed to make 
use of this great lever for uplifting the masses; 
but popular hymns lie at the core of our militant 
Protestantism. Their value is dynamic, however, 
rather than aesthetic; hence Arnold's small esteem 
for hymns. "Hymns, such as we know them," 
he declares, " are a sort of composition which I do 
not at all admire. I freely say so now, as I have 
often said it before. I regret their prevalence and 
popularity among us. Taking man in his totality 
and in the long run, bad music and bad poetry, 
to whatever good and useful purposes a man may 
often manage to turn them, are in themselves 
mischievous and deteriorating to him. Some- 
where and somehow, and at some time or other, 
he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss for 
taking delight in them. It is bad for people to 
hear such words and such a tune as the words 
and tune of *0 happy place! when shall I be, 
my God, with thee, to see thy face.?' — ^worse for 



136 Matthew Arnold 

them to take pleasure in it. And the time will 
come, I hope, when we shall feel the unsatisfac- 
toriness of our present hymns, and they will disap- 
pear from our religious services. " 

Sixteen hundred years ago, perhaps the most 
valuable element in humanity was to be found in 
the devoted Christians who worshiped secretly in 
the gloom of the catacombs. To what sort of 
melodies they sang their " psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs " can never probably be known 
exactly, but, as a recent authority remarks, " the 
Christian religion had little to do in those days 
with fashion and the fine arts. . . . The 
apostles did not travel as music teachers. . . . 
If the words sung expressed a heartfelt Christian 
faith it made little difference what modes or 
melodies were used with them." 

Coming down to more recent days, we may feel 
certain that the singing of psalms in the family 
circle, when Elgin and such quaint and quavering 
tunes "beet the heavenly flame," has usually been 
more blunt and crude than finished or artistic. 
Both the music and the poetry have often been 
distinctly "bad," and yet the resultant effects 
cannot be described as "mischievous and deteri- 



orating." 



And yet we must agree with Arnold that nothing 
deserves more to be antagonized and frowned 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 137 

upon than the combination of bad theology and 
bad poetry, to be found in too many popular 
revival hymns. Arnold knew what a good hymn 
was, and could appreciate the best type. He has 
left on record his admiration of the sublime stanza 
of Isaac Watts : 

• See, from his head, his hands, his feet, 
Sorrow and love flow mingled down ! 
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, 
Or thorns compose so rich a crown? 

Still, the poem in which this stanza appears is 
more suited for Christian meditation than for 
general singing. 

Arnold's criticism of modern hymns is altogether 
too sweepingly unfavorable; but it was through 
no lack of reverence. His reverent attitude 
toward the Bible is best brought out, I think, in 
the introductory paragraph of two lectures he 
delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical 
Institution of Edinburgh, the subject being 
"Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist." He begins 
by complimenting his audience on the breadth of 
their reading: "Your students in philosophy have 
always read pretty widely, and have not concen- 
trated themselves, as we at Oxford used to con- 
centrate ourselves, upon one or two great books. 
However, in your study of the Bible you got 
abundant experience of our attitude of mind 



138 Matthew Arnold 

toward our two philosophers. Your text-book 
was right ; there were no mistakes there. If 
there was anything obscure, anything hard to 
be comprehended, it was your ignorance which 
was at fault, your failure of comprehension. 
Just such was our mode of dealing with Butler's 
sermons and Aristotle's ethics. Whatever was 
hard, whatever was obscure, the text-book was 
all right, and our understandings were to conform 
themselves to it. What agonies of puzzle has 
Butler's account of self-love, or Aristotle's of the 
intellectual virtues, caused to clever undergraduates 
and to clever tutors; and by what feats of astonish- 
ing explanation, astonishingly acquiesced in, 
were these agonies calmed! We at Oxford used 
to read our Aristotle or our Butler with the same 
absolute faith in the classicality of their matter as 
in the classicality of Homer's form." That 
what followed was not in accordance with this 
attitude of implicit trust toward Butler may be 
gathered from the lines of his sonnet: 

WRITTEN IN butler's SERMONS 

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, 
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control, 
So men, unraveling God's harmonious whole, 

Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours. 

Vain labor! Deep and broad, where none may see, 
Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne 
Where man's one nature, queen-like, sits alone, 

Centered in a majestic unity; 




A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 139 

And rays her powers, like sister-islands seen 

Linking their coral arms under the sea, 
Or clustered peaks with plunging gulfs between, 

Spanned by aerial arches all of gold, 
Whereo'er the chariot wheels of life are rolled 
In cloudy circles to eternity. 

That he placed John Wesley above the author 
of the Analogy he makes plain in the course of 
his criticism. '* Butler, " he says, " met John Wesley 
[who admired the Analogy], and one would like 
to have a full record of w^hat passed at such a 
meeting. He [Butler] was of a most reverend 
aspect; his face thin and pale, but there was a 
divine placidness in his countenance which 
inspired veneration and expressed the most 
benevolent mind. His white hair hung gracefully 
on his shoulders, and his whole figure was 
patriarchal. This description would not ill suit 
Wesley himself, and it may be thought, perhaps, 
that here, at any rate, we find the saint. . . . 
But still the total impression left by Butler is not 
exactly that of a saint. " 

To Arnold, Wesley, with his ^'genius for godli- 
ness," was a type of saintliness. It is interesting 
to find him more in harmony with the great 
revivalist than with the Anglican bishop. Later 
on in this discussion of Butler, speaking of the 
Greek word epieikeia, that which has an air of 
consummate truth and likelihood, of "sweet 



140 Matthew Arnold 

reasonableness," he declares in words which 
Wesley would have heartily indorsed: "You know | 
what a power was this quality in the talkings and j 
dealings of Jesus Christ; epieikeia is the very word j 
to characterize true Christianity. And this Chris- i 
tianity wins, not by an argumentative victory, \ 
not by going through a long debate with a person, ;| 
examining the arguments for his case from begin- \ 
ning to end, and making him confess that, whether | 
he feels disposed to yield or no, yet in fair logic 
and fair reason he ought to yield. But it puts 
something that tends to transform him and his 
practice — it puts this particular thing in such a 
way that he feels disposed and eager to lay hold 
of it; and he does lay hold of it, though without at | 
all perceiving, very often, the whole scheme to 1 
which it belongs; and thus his practice gets * 
changed. This, I think, everyone will admit to be ; 
Christianity's characteristic way of getting people ; 
to embrace religion. Now, it is to be observed 
how totally unlike a way it is to Butler's, although 
Butler's object is the same as Christianity's — 
to get people to embrace religion. And, the object 
being the same, it must strike everyone that the 
way followed by Christianity has the advantage 
of a far greater effectiveness than Butler's way; 
since people are much more easily attracted into 
making a change than argued into it." The 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 141 

absence of "saintliness'' in the appeal made by 
Butler is evidently present to the critic, who 
remarks that the total impression left by the 
bishop is not exactly that of a saint. Arnold is 
evidently in far completer harmony v^ith Wes- 
ley, who preached, interpreted, and practiced 
Christianity as a life. 

Arnold objects to Bishop Butler that he regards 
our interests and principles of action as if they 
were things as separate, fixed, and palpable as 
bodily organs; that he speaks of benevolence as 
if it had always gone on secreting love for our 
neighbor, and of compassion as if it had gone on 
secreting a desire to relieve misery, and of con- 
science as if it always had sent forth right verdicts, 
just as the liver secretes bile. He is right in chang- 
ing Butler's expression "the desire for happiness" 
into "the instinct to live," and making this 
impulse the motor principle of life. The experi- 
ences of the unity which we know as "I" are 
divisible only in an abstract manner; for the "I" 
cannot be broken up into a combination of war- 
ring or harmonious instincts and principles to 
be regarded as separately existing, and not as 
mere facts of the individual spirit. But, in pos- 
tulating the existence of two lives or selves in a 
man, Arnold creates a duality which also is 
defensible only as an abstraction for the analyst; 



142 Matthew Arnold 

and possibly he intends his words to be construed 
in this way. "It is not true/' he states, "that 
the affections and impulses of both alike [self- 
love and benevolence] are, as Butler says, the voice 
of God; the self-love of Butler, the 'cool study 
of our private interest,' is not the voice of God. 
It is a hasty, erroneous interpretation by us, 
in our long, tentative, up-struggling develop- 
ment of the instinct-to-live, the desire-for-happi- 
ness, which is the voice of our authentic nature, 
the voice of God; and it has to be corrected by 
experience. . . . Jesus Christ said, 'Renounce 
thyself!' and yet he also said: *What is a man 
advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and yet 
lose himself, be mulcted of himself?' He said: 
*I am come that men might have life, and might 
have it more abundantly;' and *ye will not come to 
me that ye may have ItfeF And yet he said: 
'Whosoever will save his life shall lose it !' This 
psychology," says Arnold, "carries everyone 
with it" — the "psychology of Jesus Christ, which 
without the least apparatus of system is yet 
incomparably exacter than Butler's, as well as 
incomparably more illuminative and fruitful.'* 
He considers that there is no danger, such as 
Butler felt, in making the instinct to live that 
which we must set out with in explaining human 
nature, so long as we remember that only in the 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 143 

impersonal life and with the higher self is the 
instinct truly served and the desire truly satis- 
fied. 

But it is Arnold's use here of the word imper- 
sojtal that is unsatisfactory. The higher life is not 
impersonal, but more truly personal; nor is man 
asked to lose himself in the universe by "joining 
the choir invisible." The same speaker tells 
those who figuratively "lose their lives" that 
great is their reward in heaven. It is through the 
reception of other personalities unto our own 
personalities that we finally realize ourselves and 
come to find God. "Christ in us, the hope of 
glory" is not a mere trope; it is a spiritual fact, 
at the root of our religious experience. Arnold 
quotes Schleiermacher approvingly, and accepts 
what the German says in the matter of recogniz- 
ing Platonic and Greek thought in our modern 
Christianity; but he fails to appreciate the value 
of Schleiermacher's psychology. 

And what heart knows another? 
Ah! who knows his own? 

These are the dreamy questions of the poet. 
Flis conception of friendship suffers under this 
limitation : 

Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass 

Upon the boundless ocean-plain, 
So on the sea of life, alas! 

Man meets man — meets and quits again. 



144 Matthew Arnold 

The bond is a temporary one, liable to be broken \ 

again at any time; "to friends," he says in one of ,j 

his poems, "we have no natural right;" we have \ 
no property in them. But this is just what 

Schleiermacher and the modern idealist deny. i 

When Archbishop Trench lay dying his chap- ; 

lain began to read at his request the glowing pas- ! 

sage from PauFs Second Epistle to Timothy i 

beginning, " For God has not given to us the spirit ] 

of fear. " When he came to the words, " I know \ 

in whom I have believed," "Hold, hold!" cried • 

the dying saint; "not m whom, but whom — I l 

know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded ; 

that he is able to guard that which I have \ 

committed to him against that day." | 

It is this immediate knowledge and belief of i 

the heart which is lacking in Arnold's whole treat- ! 

ment of religious themes. His psychology is the ) 

out-of-date psychology of the isolated man, which j 

marked the eighteenth century type of thought; ! 

poor, little, feeble man, a mere accident in the ] 

great machinery of the universe! Arnold's | 
"Nature" is a misconception of God's creation: 

Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring, 
Man's senseless uproar mingling with his toil, 
Still do thy quiet ministers move on, 

Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; 
Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil; 
Laborers that shall not fail, when man is gone. 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 145 

But man is an integral portion of the great 
eternity of mind which makes use of matter as a 
master makes use of a servant. Mind is, so to 
speak, a great ocean, which moves fluidly, with no 
loss, but a constant gain. We are heirs, not only 
of what our fathers have done in the material 
world, but of what they have been unable to 
do in the spiritual world — their apparently 
fruitless efforts, their ideals and longings; 
and there is room in the universe for the 
individual survival of everyone. Not force, 
conceived as present in atoms, is power, but 
personality; and the words wise, good, true 
have a meaning only when used as attributes 
of some personality. The communion of saints 
perpetuates itself by the communication of virtue 
from one person to another. No worse psychol- 
ogy could be uttered than Arnold's statement 
in his sonnet "The Divinity," that "Wisdom 
and goodness they are God." To pray to wis- 
dom and goodness is an impossibility and an 
absurdity. Will, aspiration, sympathy, love, 
beauty are unthinkable apart from the beings 
in whom they inhere, and who, by living, give 
them reality. The reality in the world is the 
warm, expansive life of persons in touch with 
the center of Life and Love. We are mysteriously 

bound to one another and to God, as the branches 
10 



146 Matthew Arnold 

of a tree belong to each other and to the trunk 
and roots. We find absolute truth not by 
isolating ourselves from our fellows, but by identi- 
fying our lives with theirs. "The social con- 
sciousness," says Schleiermacher, "finds its satis- 
faction only in stepping out of the limits of its 
own personality, and taking up into its own per- 
sonality the things pertaining to other personali- 
ties. Every one must concede as a matter of 
experience that it is his natural condition to stand 
always in a many-sided fellowship of feeling, 
and his feeling of absolute dependence on God 
has been awakened by the communicative and 
stimulative power of human utterance. " 

In his strangely unsympathetic and antiquated 
attitude toward the ocean Arnold failed to grasp the 
conception which makes of the great encircling 
element not a dragon or force of evil, as it 
appeared to the early world, but the symbol of an 
all-prevailing, all-embracing Deity. Schleier- 
macher's theology has received a poetic interpre- 
tation from Whittier: 

Immortal Love, forever full, 

Forever flowing free, 
Forever shared, forever whole, 

A never-ebbing sea ! 

The Quaker poet here gives expression to a 
truth which has refreshed and vivified modern 



A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 147 

theology, and has brought us nearer to the mind 
of God. Noble as were Homer and the Greeks, 
full of inspiration as were the Hebrew prophets 
whom Arnold so passionately admired, still there 
were left in the domain of religion some fresh 
aspects of truth and beauty for the modern world 
to grasp, and this is one of them. 

Truth does not lie buried in the tombs of 
ancient Greece. With all his sweet reasonable- 
ness, his culture and his open-minded rationalism, 
Arnold was strangely old-fashioned and con- 
servative in his religious outlook — a veritable 
Sadducee. After all, the future of Judaism and 
of the world was not with the Sadducees. Men 
like Paul, reared Pharisees, gave up their early 
creed to become teachers of the Cross, which was 
to the Jews a stumbling-block; to the Greeks, 
foolishness; and to those Hellenized Jews, the 
Sadducees, both one and the other. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD IN ARNOLD 

On one occasion the Platonist and idealist, 
Frederic W. H. Myers — known to all lovers of 
Wordsworth for his classic little biography of the 
poet — ^was walking under the elms in the Fellows' 
Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, in com- 
pany with an earnest-eyed woman. His com- 
panion was George Eliot. "She, stirred some- 
what beyond her wont, and taking as her text 
the three words which have been used so often as 
the inspiring trumpet call of men — the words, 
God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with 
terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the 
■jirst, how unbelievable the second, and yet how 
peremptory and absolute was the third.'' In 
making this emphatic profession of belief the 
novelist pretty well expressed the intellectual 
attitude of the Victorian age, a century of spiritual 
doubt and unrest. 

To the devout Christian the three conceptions 
of God, Immortality, and Duty are bound together 
by an indissoluble tie. God is personal; Immor- 
tality rests on a personal basis; Duty is a personal 

relation with a perfect Being whose constant help- 

148 



The Fatherhood of God 149 

fulness constitutes part of his perfection. As 
soon as we make God an abstraction we cause 
the hope of immortality to vanish, and destroy 
the very roots of Duty as an expulsive, impulsive 
reality. Just as plants and the simpler denizens 
of the sea are steadily heliocentric — turning ever 
to the sun — so are human hearts theocentric; 
and must be, for their spiritual health. 

Many are willing to accept, as fairly well 
embodying their religious aspirations on the sub- 
ject of immortality, the lines of George Eliot, 
which begin with a phrase that has given its name 
to a book of the day, with a passing vogue: 

THE CHOIR INVISIBLE 

O may I join the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead who live again 

In minds made better by their presence: live 

In pulses stirred to generosity, 

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 

For miserable aims that end with self, 

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 

And with their mild persistence urge man's search 

To vaster issues. So to live is heaven. 

Such is the Positivist creed — a creed of abstrac- 
tions; a creed limited to the amelioration of 
earthly conditions; a creed that has no use for the 
continuation of personality after death. When, 
fifty years ago, it was proposed to start in Lon- 
don a Positivist church, based on the teachings of 
Auguste Comte, eager minds resolved to supply it 



150 Matthew Arnold 

with a liturgy, and George Eliot was asked to pro- 
vide an anthem. "The Choir Invisible" was the 
response; and it is an emphatic negation of per- 
sonal immortality, as a fond dream of the imagi- 
nation. 

To me the lines have never appealed, either as 
attractive religion or as good poetry. Rather 
would I describe them as a string of platitudes, 
lacking the essence of noble and lucid poetry. 
Immortal life begins and ends with personality. 
As the babe starts out on the voyage of life by 
resting its eyes on its fond mother, so the dying 
saint looks heavenward to the divine face of the 
Master, which blesses, invites, and welcomes. 

Queen Victoria, v/ho had shown herself for 
half a century the ablest statesman in the broad 
British empire, repeated with her dying breath 
those lines of personal appeal: 

My faith looks up to thee, 
Thou Lamb of Calvary, 
Saviour divine! 

Her natural expression at this supreme hour was 
just one of those hymns which, from his Olym- 
pian height of art perfection, Arnold was wont to 
regard so superciliously. 

And yet no one was more attached to that 
exquisite heritage of our Christian faith, the 
church liturgy, and the other concrete expressions 



The Fatherhood of God 151 

of our devotional life. But he spent an immense 
amount of energy and sweet persuasiveness in 
trying to prove that heaven is a kind of land 
of Lyonnesse, an exquisite Nowhere, and that 
the Bible is a sort of "Morte d' Arthur," with 
only a literary truth and reality finally appertain- 
ing to it. He wanted no brand-new Comtist 
anthem and Comtist liturgy. 

Arnold was a victim of the fallacy that religious 
beliefs can be stripped of mystery; that they are 
all, Hke the planks in a political platform, sub- 
ject to general discussion for final approba- 
tion or rejection; and that religious constituencies 
have to be educated up to a condition in which 
the attitude of rational discussion becomes nor- 
mal and habitual. The church might thus be 
regarded as an intellectual club or symposium, 
the members whereof, animated by a spirit of 
sweet reasonableness, are able to adjust their 
platform to the needs of the community. 

He fails strangely to recognize that final force of 
tremendous individual conviction, demanding from 
the will unhesitating obedience; all with Arnold 
is on the basis of an easy and refined optimism. 
A deeper and more thorough realization of what 
religious faith really is would have taught him 
that the world is not moved and impelled onward 
in this way. Civilizations are borne to new lands. 



152 Matthew Arnold 

not by intelligent exponents of their advantages, 
but by fearless missionaries whose whole life is 
a credo; and a civilization without this credo is 
a tottering structure. The gospel of the cross, 
preached by Saint Paul, was not, to the Greeks, 
sweet reasonableness, but foolishness. Its ac- 
ceptance has ever demanded an exercise of deep 
personal humility and submission of the proud 
intellectual will, which Arnold, with all his sympa- 
thetic nature, disdainfully rejected. The final 
truth which makes us free is not found in an 
enthusiastic recognition of intellectual abstractions, 
but in mystic union with the personality which 
guides the universe; a mystic union which 
demands a constant exercise, not so much of self- 
repression and negative self-renunciation as of 
obedient activity and ardent devotion. Warmth 
and faith as displayed in religious matters, often 
crudely and oddly, Arnold treats with a pitying 
sadness which suits the case dramatically; it is 
the attitude of the superior person face to face 
with the great reality of life. It is as if a cultured 
Greek had returned to earth and was gazing at 
our modern world, "where clash contending 
powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, 
Rome." Himself one of the most amiable and 
forgiving of men, who never harbored a grudge or 
cursed an enemy, yet he had some of the " defects 



f 



The Fatherhood of God 153 

of his qualities," to use a French phrase. He 
was too amiable to profess a creed which meant 
aught but sweetness and Hght to everybody con- 
cerned. Because there is much severe denunci- 
ation in Matthew's gospel, therefore John's gospel 
is undoubtedly the sacred record which brings 
us closer to the Master! 

George Eliot, who has supplied lis with a 
pseudo-anthem of abstractions which does not 
bring religion nearer to us, has also furnished us, 
in perhaps the greatest of her stories, with a bril- 
liant description of religion in its essence. The 
germ of "Adam Bede," she herself tells us, was an 
anecdote told her by her Methodist "Aunt Samuel" 
Evans, wife of her father's younger brother. 
They were sitting together one afternoon, when it 
occurred to the elder to relate the story of a visit 
she had to make to a condemned criminal — a very 
ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and 
refused to confess. Mrs. Evans stayed with her 
praying during the night; and the poor creature 
at last broke out into tears and confessed her * 
crime. The good woman afterward accompanied 
the girl in the cart to the place of execution — for 
there occurred no melodramatic reprieve as in 
the case of Hetty Sorrel ! 

How beautifully George Eliot tells the story in 
her "Adam Bede": 



154 Matthew Arnold 

"Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul 
went forth in her voice: 

" *Jesus, thou present Saviour! Thou hast 
known the depths of all sorrow; thou hast 
entered that black darkness where God is not, 
and hast uttered the cry of the forsaken. . . . 

" 'Saviour! it is yet time — time to snatch this 
poor soul from everlasting darkness, I believe — 
I believe in thy infinite love. What is my love 
or my pleading ? It is quenched in thine. I 
can only clasp her in my weak arms, and urge her 
with my weak pity. Thou — ^thou wilt breathe 
on the dead soul and it shall arise from the unan- 
swering sleep of death. 

" *Yea, Lord, I see thee coming through the 
darkness, coming like the morning, with healing 
on thy wings.' '* 

Here the impassioned prayer actually breaks 
at last into a rhythmic chant. This is a prayer 
for power, not a mere aspiration after purity and 
perfection. Is it all a mere illusion t A com- 
memorative tablet in the Wesleyan chapel at 
Wirksworth tells that it was "Erected by numer- 
ous friends to the memory of Elizabeth Evans, 
known to the world as 'Dinah Bede,' who during 
many years proclaimed alike in the open air, the 
sanctuary, and from house to house, the love of 
Christ." 



The Fatherhood of God 155 

Was her story a mere fairy tale ? Is the Christ 
she invoked a personage of the past, and power- 
less to save ? So Arnold tells us, through the 
lips of Obermann: 

While we believed, on earth He went, 

And open stood His grave. 
Men called from chamber, church, and tent, 

And Christ was by to save. 

Now He is dead! Far hence He lies 

In the lorn Syrian town ; 
And on His grave, with shining eyes. 

The Syrian stars look down. 

In vain men still, with hoping new, 

Regard His death-place dumb, 
And say the stone is not yet to, 

And wait for words to come. 

Ah, from that silent sacred land, 

Of sun, and arid stone. 
And crumbling wall, and sultry sand. 

Comes now one word alone! 

From David's lips that word did roll, 

*Tis true and living yet: 
No man can save his brother's soul. 

Nor pay his brother's debt. 

Alone, self-poised, henceforward man 

Must labor; must resign 
His all too human creeds, and scan 

Simply the way divine. 

This is a direct blow leveled at a cherished 
Christian belief. We know from his prose writings 
how much Arnold disliked the doctrine of sub- 
stitution or imputed righteousness. "In the 



156 Matthew Arnold 

scientific language of Protestant theology," he 
states in his "Saint Paul and Protestantism,'* "to 
embrace Christ, to have saving faith, is *to give 
our consent heartily to the covenant of grace, and 
so to receive the benefit of justification, whereby 
God pardons all our sins and accepts us as 
righteous for the righteousness of Christ imputed 
to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as 
we have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. 
Wesley, with his genius for godliness, struggled 
all his life for some deeper and more edifying 
account of that faith, which he felt working 
wonders in his own soul, than that it was a hearty 
consent to the covenant of grace and an accept- 
ance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteous- 
ness. Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but 
intellectually slight and shallow compared to Paul, 
beat his wings in vain. . . . 'He that believes 
in Christ,' says Wesley, 'discerns spiritual things: 
he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' 
There is nothing practical here. A company of 
Cornish revivalists will have no difficulty in tast- 
ing, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times 
over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for 



it to-morrow morning." 



An ungracious and shallow comment. If any- 
one can draw from Arnold's rosewater religion 
of sweetness and light a power for salvation such 



The Fatherhood of God 157 

as has changed many a Cornish miner from a 
brute into a saint, then it will be time to get rid 
of the mystery of Christ's imputed righteousness. 
Arnold's aloofness from the main current of 
vital religion is modified when he actually touches 
noble personality. In no instance is this more 
apparent than in the exquisite apostrophe to his 
dead father, the elegy known as "Rugby Chapel." 
Rejecting elsewhere, for intellectual reasons, the 
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, and cutting it 
out peremptorily from his patchwork "system," 
he there restores this elemental truth of Chris- 
tianity to its proper place. Faith and trust bear 
him for the moment irresistibly on their wings. 
In one other passage in his poems heightened 
emotion carries him up to the same glorious incon- 
sistency. It is present in those stanzas addressed 
to Marguerite, where he bids her a long farewell : 

We school our manners, act our parts — 
But He, who sees us through and through, 

Knows that the bent of both our hearts 
Was to be gentle, tranquil, true. 

And though we wear out life, alas! 

Distracted as a homeless wind. 
In beating where we must not pass, 

In seeking what we shall not find ; 

Yet we shall one day gain, life past, 
Clear prospect o'er our being's whole; 

Shall see ourselves, and learn at last 
Our true affinities of soul. 






158 Matthew Arnold 

We shall not then deny a course 
To every thought the mass ignore ; 

We shall not then call hardness force, 

Nor lightness wisdom any more. ^-. 

Then, in the Eternal Father's smile, 

Our soothed, encouraged souls will dare 

To seem as free from pride and guile, 
As good, as generous, as they are. 

Here he is face to face with an ideal womanly 
personality. 

To the memory of his great and good father 
Arnold remained true in word, and thought, and 
deed during his life. He never ceased, to worship 
God as his father had worshiped him. It was 
after attending divine service at the church of 
Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren) in Liverpool 
that a fatal heart spasm carried him off. 

Arnold's practical interpretation of prayer was 
far fuller and richer than the meager definition 
we gather from his writings — a mere "energy of 
aspiration toward the principle of good." He 
early learned what real prayer v^as at his father's 
knees. One of the passages which Dr. Thomas 
Arnold entered in his journal a few weeks before 
his death is quite touching: "May God keep me 
in the hour of death through Jesus Christ; and 
preserve me from overfear, as well as from pre- 
sumption. Now, O Lord, whilst I am in health, 
keep my heart fixed on thee by faith, and then 



The Fatherhood of God 159 

I shall not lose thee in sickness or in death. 
Guide and strengthen and enkindle me, and bless 
those dearest to me, and those committed to my 
charge, and keep them thine, and guide and sup- 
port them in thy holy ways. Keep sin far from 
them, O Lord, and let it not come upon them 
through any neglect of mine." 

A modern poet of extreme naturalistic creed 
has quoted a phrase applied to Matthew Arnold 
— " David, the son of Goliath. " While admitting 
its quaint absurdity, he yet asserts its essential 
applicability. No doubt Mr. Swinburne intends 
to imply that the elder Arnold was a narrow bigot 
or Philistine, while his sOn rose into a higher 
plane of undogmatic cosmopolitanism. But, on 
the other hand, it might with more justice be 
contended that the younger Arnold's cosmopoli- 
tanism was his weakness, while his father's 
straight creed and sturdy patriotism were his 
strength. A father's greatness of soul often breathes 
through the impassioned words of his son. It was 
William Burns — the most conscientious man in 
the whole countryside — ^who inspired the stanzas 
of "The Cotter's Saturday Night. " To his doubt- 
ing son the elder Arnold remained through life a 
beam of hope, reviving the great truths of the 
Fatherhood of God and of a fuller life beyond 
the grave: 



i6o Matthew Arnold 

Yes, in some far-shining sphere, 

Conscious or not of the past, 

Still thou performest the word 

Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live — 

Prompt, unwearied, as here! 

The second line of the above, with its dubious 
note, is to be regretted; but a fuller note is struck 
later on in the poem, where the communion of 
saints is addressed: 

Servants of God ! — or sons 
Shall I not call you? because 
Not as servants ye knew 
Your Father's innermost mind, 
His who unwillingly sees 
One of his little ones lost — 
Yours is the praise, if mankind 
Hath not as yet in its march 
Fainted, and fallen, and died! 

There is the same tender, vibrating string 
touched here as in his sonnet "The Good Shep- 
herd with the Kid." The flimsy negations and 
abstractions of his pseudo-theology are brushed 
aside, and he speaks the language of Christian 
faith and hope. He thinks and talks of life as 
God's service; of God as the keeper of our souls, 

who unwillingly sees 
One of his little ones lost. 

The "secret of Jesus,'' whereof Arnold talks 
elsewhere so freely and so ineffectually, is the 
power to help others to a fuller life. It is not 
mere self-renunciation; it is the realization of a 



The Fatherhood of God i6i 

fuller life by the transmission of life to those who 
stand in need of it. Arnold recognizes this in 
his "East London" sonnet: 

I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 

"111 and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?" 
"Bravely," said he, "for I of late have been 

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread. " 

The words "thoughts of" may be eliminated, 
to the strengthening of the whole passage. The 
insertion of the intellectual link is less in harmony 
with the religious trust in Him who came that 
his flock might, through him, have life, and have 
it more abundantly, and through this transmitting 
vitality attain to sonship and heirship. Arnold 
describes the earthly mission of these sons and 
heirs very nobly: 

Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
Strengthen the wavering line, 
Stablish, continue our march, 
On, to the bound of the waste, 
On, to the City of God. 

The lines form a fitting peroration to the great 

elegy on his much-loved father; thev are last 

words in a full and special sense. 
II 



INDEX 



"AdamBede," 153 
Americans, Criticism of, 59 
Animals as automata, 106 
Apocrypha, The, 123 
Aquinas, Thomas, loi 
Arnold, Matthew, Goethe's 
influence, 7-10; a lover of 
lucidity, 1 2 ; his disdainful 
Urania, 15, 16; Spinoza's 
influence, 20-22; on Less- 
ing's "Laocoon," 22-26; ex- 
aggerated estimate of 
Homer and Shakespeare, 
28; his use of "immortal" 
and "divine," 30; his love 
for France, 31; the Mar- 
guerite poems, 31, 32; the 
Obermann poems, 33-37; 
his conception of prayer, 
37; antique view of the 
ocean, 38, 39; misquotes 
Keats, 40, 41; his final 
appreciation of Senancour, 
46; his admiration for 
Marcus Aurelius, 48, 49; 
early associations with 
Wordsworth, 50, 51 ; his ap- 
preciation of Wordsworth, 
52; on illusions, 57, 58; 
on revivals, 59; on modern 
Evangelicalism, 64; on 
American friendship, 64; 
on childhood and immor- 
tality, 66-70; makes his- 
toric mouthpiece of Em- 
pedocles, 7 1 ; simile of the 
mirror, 72; the meter of 
"Empedocles on Etna," 
77, 78; his personal ap- 
pearance, 79; his attitude 
toward miracles, 88; he 
protests against his being 



identified with his charac- 
ters, 94; his fondness for 
household pets, 105; his 
Greek eleos, 109; subtle de- 
light in pathos, 112; his 
early acquaintance with 
geology, 113, 114; fondness 
for botany, 11 6- 118; mis- 
conception of the Eternal, 
121; fond of Ecclesiasticus 
and its teachings, 124; 
attacks Trinitarianism, 129, 
130 ; dislike of English Uni- 
tarianism, 131; under the 
spell of Emerson, 132; 
depreciates modem hymns, 
1 34 ; on Bishop Butler, 137; 
admiration for Wesley, 
139, 140; his psychology of 
an antiquated type, 144; 
preaches a religion stripped 
of mystery, 151; his dislike 
of the doctrine of imputed 
righteousness, 155; his rev- 
erence for his father's mem- 
ory, 158; recognizes the 
divine sonship of men, 160. 

Arnold, Thomas, 11, 115, 
126, 130, 158 

Atossa, Arnold's cat, iii 

Aurelius, Marcus, 48 

"Bacchanalia," 119 

"Balaustion's Adventures," 

79 
Beauties of earth. Morbid 

teaching regarding the, 117 

Ben Sirach, 125 

Birds and mankind, no 

Botany, Arnold's acquaint- 
ance with, 1 1 6-1 18 

Browning, Robert, 39, 75, 80- 

83, 76, 94 



163 



164 



Index 



Buckland, Dean, 114-115 
Bunsen, Baron, 115 
Burns, Robert, 108 
Butler, Bishop, 107, 138-139 
"Butler and the Zeit-Geist," 

^ 137 

Byron, Lord, 39-52 
Canary, Nelly Arnold's Mat- 
thias, no. III 
"Canticle of the Creatures," 

103 
Cartesian proof of God's 

existence, 92 
Cat, Atossa, in 
Catacombs, Hymnsof the, 136 
Catholic Church the church 

of the future, 134 
"Choir Invisible, The," 149 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 92 
Coleridge, Justice, 115 
Coleridge, S. T., 62, 102 
Comte, Augusta, 29, 149 
Conviction, Force of individ- 
ual, 151 
Cosmopolitanism, Arnold's, 

159 
"Culture and Anarchy," 59 

Dante and Goethe, 15 

Dawson, W. H., 88, 89 

Descartes, 106 

Dog in the Scriptures, The, 
105, 106 

Duff, SirM. G., 118 

"East London" sonnet, 161 

Ecclesiasticus, 124 

Eleos, Greek, 109 

Eliot, George, 148-153 

Emerson, R, W., 45, 90, 131, 
132 

"EmpedoclesonEtna," 71-94 

"Enoch Arden," 42 

Epieikeia, or sweet reason- 
ableness, 139 

"Excursion," Wordsworth's, 
56 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 15 

Fox How in the Lake Dis- 
trict, 52 

Francis d'Assisi, 101-104 



Fuller, Margaret, on prayer, 3 7 
Gautier, Thdophile, 58 
Geist, the dachshund, 108 
"Geist's Grave," 108, 109 
Geology, Arnold's acquaint- 
ance with, 116 
Goat in Scripture, The, 97 
God, 145 

Goethe, 7-21, 35, 83 
"Good Shepherd with the 

Kid, The," 99, 160 
"Growing Old," 95 
Gu6rin, Maurice de, 39 
Gypsy Child, Lines to a, 66-68 
Herbert, George, 126 
Heywood's proverb, 105 
Homer, 28 
Hutton, R. H., 112 
Huxley, Professor, 125 
Hymns, 134-136 
Idees-Forces, 46 
Illusion, Doctrine of, 57 
"Imitation of Christ, The," 

102 
Immortality, 29, 66-70, 107, 

148 
Impersonal, Arnold's use of 

the word, 143 
Imputed righteousness, 155 
"In Memoriam," 9, 15, 17, 

42, 116 
"Intimations of Immortal- 
ity," Wordsworth's, 56 
Isaiah's Restoration- Proph- 
ecy, 126 
Jesus, The secret of, 160 
"Jesus" hymns of the Mora- 
vians, 135 
Keats on the ocean, 39-41 
"Kid, The Good Shepherd 

with the," 99 
Lake School, The, 52 
Lavater, 84 
Leibnitz, 106 
Lessing and his Laocoon, 

22-29 
Lewes, George Henry, 81 
"Literature and Dogma," 
127, 130 



Index 



165 



Luther, Martin, 2$, 105, 135 
Maclaren, Ian, 158 
Marguerite poems, 31, 32, 157 
"Memorial Verses," 52 
Methodism, 59-61 
Milton, 7, 16 
Miracles, 88 
Moody, D. W., 62 
Mosaic cosmogony, 114 
Music, Mission of, 26 
Myers, F. W. H., 89, 148 
Mystefy in religion, 151 
Newman, Cardinal, 37, 66 
Newton, Isaac, 105, 121 
Note-Book, Arnold's, 8 
"Obermann Once More," 18 
Obermann poems, 32-38 
Ocean, Arnold's treatment of 

(see Sea), 146 
Oxford and science, 113 
"Pagan and Mediaeval Reli- 
gious Sentiment," 103 
Pascal on prayer, 85 
Pathos in Arnold, iii, 112 
Personality in Arnold's teach- 
ing, i43» 144 
Pessimism, 46 
"Peter Bell," Wordsworth's, 

60 
Pharisee and Sadducee, 123, 

147 
Philistine, 159 
Plato, 72 
Positivists, 149 
Potter and the wheel, The, 

73, 84 
Prayer. Arnold's conception 

of, 36, 156 
Psychology, Arnold's, 142, 

143 
Puritanism and childhood, 67 

"Rab and His Friends," 108 

"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 72-77 

Ramond, 35 

"Resignation," 28 

Resurrection of Christ, The, 

89 



"Rugby Chapel," 157 
Rydal in the Lake District, 

50 
Sadducee, A typical, 124 

"Saint Paul and Protestant- 
ism," 74, 153 
Sainte-Beuve, 33, 34 
Saintsbury, Professor, 11, 57 
Sand, George, S3, 37, 45 
Schleiermacher, 143-146 
Scott, Sir Walter, 108 
Sea, Arnold's conception of 

the, 31,35-43 
"Self-Dependence,'' 42 
Senancour, 37-46 
Shaftesburys,The three Lord, 

128 
Shakespeare, 28, 29, 105 
Sirach, Son of, 123 
Smith, the father of geology, 

^ 113 

Southey, Robert, 62 

Spinoza, Benedict, 19, 20, 21 

"Stagirius," 13 

State church, Necessity of 

a, 133 
Stoicism, 86 

"Summer Night, A," 10 
Swinburne, Algernon, 159 
Tennyson, Alfred, 8, 9, 16 
"The Future," 116 
"Thyrsis," 117 
Topffer, 33 
Trench, Archbishop, Story 

of, 144 
Trinitarianism, 128 
Unitarianism, 130-132 
Urania, 15-17 

Wallace, Alfred Russell, 88 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 88 
Watts, Isaac, 137 
Wesley, John, 61, 139, 140, 

156 
Whittier the poet, 53, 146 
Wisdom book of Sirach, 123 
Wordsworth, William, 40, 

48-57 



31^77-1 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 385 711 6 



m 



■ 




1 J 




'*. ' ' ' '■ 









